Dead shark washes up on Florida shore with plastic hat brim wrapped around neck
A shark that washed ashore in Florida last week wasn’t just dead. It also had a gruesome reminder of man’s impact on the ocean wrapped around its head, a photo shows.
Ringing the 6-foot animal’s neck and gills like a tight collar was a large piece of plastic. The strip of man-made material was the brim remaining from an old hat, according to St. Johns County parks and recreation staff.
County staff discovered the dead finetooth shark on Friday along the shore in Ponte Vedra, Florida, south of Jacksonville on the Atlantic coast, officials said in a Facebook post Tuesday.
Finetooth sharks swim in the waters between North Carolina and Brazil, officials said, and the sharks travel along the Florida coast near Ponte Vedra as they migrate south in the fall. The sharks also call the Gulf of Mexico home, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“Although the cause of death is undetermined without a necropsy of the animal, this is another great example of how plastic marine debris is not just a global issue, but a local one as well,” county parks and recreation staff said.
Researchers estimate that 300 million tons of plastic litter are strewn in the world’s oceans. Just last year, scientists discovered that man-made plastic debris has now reached the deepest, darkest depths of the seas — and is inside the bodies of little-understood crustaceans who live there.
“Litter discarded into the oceans will ultimately end up washed back ashore or sinking to the deep-sea,” Dr. Alan Jamieson, who led that research at Newcastle University, said in a statement announcing the findings. “There are no other options.”
Humans didn’t even mass produce plastics until roughly 60 years ago, National Geographic reports. But since then, there’s been an explosion in production of plastic that goes into everything from clothes to food containers.
It’s not just plastic that can impact marine life, though.
In August, a female Kemp’s ridley sea turtle — the most endangered sea turtle on the planet — was found dead, bloodied and trapped in a barstool off Florida’s panhandle, McClatchy reported at the time.
“This is so very sad, and so easy to stop. Please do not leave your items, anything, on the beach,” the nonprofit South Walton Turtle Watch wrote in a Facebook post sharing images of the dead animal. “Look at her head to see what she went through.”
This story was originally published October 16, 2018 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Dead shark washes up on Florida shore with plastic hat brim wrapped around neck."