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The world’s their bathtub
Philip Jackman, Globe and Mail
The British are a keen-eyed island race, and many of them living in southwest England are keeping their eyes peeled for bathtub toys that have been floating around the world’s oceans for 15 years and are due to wash up on local shores in the next few weeks.
It’s a story that began in 1992. In rough weather in the Pacific Ocean, a container of plastic bathtub toys went overboard from a ship sailing from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., and broke open. The 29,000 turtles, ducks, beavers and frogs that were freed from their container prison have been floating around the world ever since. Their travels have been tracked by retired oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer of Seattle using findings sent to him by a network of beachcombers.
The toys’ journey has been remarkable. Since going overboard, one group has circled the north Pacific between Alaska and Japan five times. But other groups have struck out in other directions.
“Some of them peeled off to the north [through the Bering Strait],” Mr. Ebbesmeyer said, “over to eastern Greenland, down to Labrador, over to about where the Titanic sank off Newfoundland, then turned east and went over to Europe where a frog was found in Scotland. On the U.S. side, a duck was found in Maine.”
(19 July 2007)
Amusing story, but the grim underlying phenomenon (not mentioned in the article) is the tragic pollution of the ocean caused by plastics: Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas (Los Angeles Times):
On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, their bellies full of trash. Swirling masses of drifting debris pollute remote beaches and snare wildlife.
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Rising floodwaters play the cat to billions of Chinese mice
Peter Ford, Christian Science Monitor
Evicted by flooding, fleeing mice in southern China are said to have turned hillsides black with their presence.
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Even in China, where staggering statistics are commonplace (1.3 billion people, $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves – they trip off the tongue), 2 billion is an awful lot of field mice.
That, according to local newspapers, is the number of small furry rodents currently plaguing the shores of Dongting Lake, munching their way through everything they can find after having been flushed out of their nests by the lake’s rising floodwaters.
Just who estimated the mouse numbers is unclear. Nor, presumably, has anybody counted each one of the 2.3 million mice said to have been killed in Hunan province over the past fortnight by smacks with a shovel, poison, or traps.
Mr. Yi, a local government official in Lujiao, reports that poison is preferred in his village because it is the most effective. “I have never seen so many mice,” he says in a telephone interview. “There are dead mice everywhere, in the front yard, the backyard, the courtyard. Because it is warm now they smell – I am collecting them up in big bags and burying them.”
The swarms of voracious animals – said by eyewitnesses to have turned whole hillsides black with their presence – recall stories from the Bible. But they are a signal less of heavenly wrath than of man’s carelessness, according to environmentalists.
(20 July 2007)
