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Tuesday March 19, 2024

Dead whale in Philippines had 40 kg of plastic in stomach

By AFP
March 19, 2019

MANILA: A starving whale with 40 kilos of plastic trash in its stomach has died after being washed ashore in the Philippines, activists said on Monday, calling it one of the worst cases of poisoning they have seen.

Environmental groups have tagged the Philippines as one of the world’s biggest ocean polluters due to its reliance on single-use plastic. The agency and an environmental group performed a necropsy on the animal and found about 40 kilograms of plastic, including grocery bags and rice sacks. The animal died from starvation and was unable to eat because of the trash filling its stomach, said Darrell Blatchley, director of D’ Bone Collector Museum Inc., which helped conduct the examination.

"It’s very disgusting and heartbreaking," he told AFP. "We’ve done necropsies on 61 dolphins and whales in the last 10 years and this is one of the biggest amounts of plastic we’ve seen."

The 15.4-foot long whale was stranded in Mabini town on Friday where local officials and fishermen tried to release it, only for the creature to return to shallow water, said the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. "It could not swim on its own, emaciated and weak," regional bureau director Fatma Idris said.