Plastic found in stomach of dead whale

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had a large lump of plastic waste in its stomach, including drinking cups and flipflops, a park official said Tuesday, causing concern among environmentalists and government officials in one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries.

Rescuers from Wakatobi National Park found the rotting carcass of the 31-foot sperm whale late Monday near the park in Southeast Sulawesi province after receiving a report from environmentalists that villagers had surrounded the dead whale and were beginning to butcher the rotting carcass, park chief Heri Santoso said.

Santoso said researchers from wildlife conservation group World Wildlife Fund and the park’s conservation academy found about 13 pounds of plastic waste in the animal’s stomach containing 115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, two flip-flops, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 other assorted pieces of plastic.

“Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” said Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation coordinator at World Wildlife Fund Indonesia.

She said it was not possible to determine whether the plastic had caused the whale’s death because of the animal’s advanced state of decay.

AP/AKKP Wakatobi/MUHAMMAD IRPAN SEJATI TASSAKKA Researchers in a national park in Sulawesi, Indonesia, collect data Tuesday on a dead whale, whose stomach was found to contain about 13 pounds of plastic waste.