Marine biologist finds 88 pounds of plastic inside dead whale's stomach

A marine biologist in the Philippines made a startling discovery last week during the autopsy of a young Cuvier's beaked whale.

Darrell Blatchley found 88 pounds of plastic inside the whale's stomach, "compact to the point that its stomach was literally as hard as a baseball," he told NPR. "That means that this animal has been suffering not for days or weeks but for months or even a year or more." Blatchley, based in Davao, drove two hours to see the whale, which was found alive but vomiting blood. The whale died a few hours later.

Blatchley said the whale's stomach contained 16 rice sacks and plastic bags from local grocery store chains. Over the last decade, 57 whales and dolphins within the Davao Gulf have "died due to man," Blatchley said, "whether they ingested plastic or fishing nets or other waste, or gotten caught in pollution — and four were pregnant." So far this year, three whales or dolphins have been found by Blatchley and his team with plastic in their systems.

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The U.N. Environment Program says that about nine million tons of plastic winds up in the ocean every year, and the Ocean Conservancy found in 2017 that more than half of all that garbage comes from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Blatchley told NPR he hopes the most recent whale death will bring attention to this crisis. "If we keep going this way, it will be more uncommon to see an animal die of natural causes than it is to see an animal die of plastic," he said.