A juvenile Cuvier’s beaked whale which washed up on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao had 88 pounds of plastic waste in its stomach which marine biologists extracted in a devastating display of how Earth’s oceans are minefields for these animals.
Marine biologist Darrell Blatchley pulled “grocery bags, plastic garbage bags, four banana plantation sacks and 16 rice sacks” from the whale’s entrails, the Washington Post reports.
Said Blatchley to NPR: “It was full of plastic — nothing but nonstop plastic. It was compact to the point that its stomach was literally as hard as a baseball. That means that this animal has been suffering not for days or weeks but for months or even a year or more.”
