Brown Pelican |
Green Sea Turtle |
Last week, my mom and I walked on the beach after I was done volunteering at Save Our Seabirds. What we saw was very upsetting. First we found a dead brown pelican. Someone had put a cigar into its bill. I removed the cigar from its bill and adding it to the trash I was removing from the beach. We continued walking and in the distance, we saw some people taking something out of the water. We were pretty far away so I could not tell what it was right away, it looked a little like a sea turtle. I walked over and we saw that they pulled a dead sea turtle out of the water and were reporting it to Mote. It had several fibropapilloma tumors on it which could have caused its death. Another sad thing that was on the beach was the amount of trash that lined the shore. I must have picked up a hundred plastic bottle caps plus lots of other trash like an old battery. The reason why I am starting my beach clean-up project is to remove the trash on the beach before it gets eaten by animals and pollutes the ocean. I also hope to educate people about the threats that debris has on not just our coastline, but on the ocean and the animals that live in it.
Trash That We Picked Up |