Marine biologist blames ocean trash for whale shark’s death  

A Davao City-based American marine biologist expressed rage over the death of a 14-foot long whale shark found in Tagum City, Davao del Norte on Tuesday, which he blamed on ocean trash.

In his viral Facebook post, Darrell Blatchley, who is also the president of D’ Bone Collector Museum Inc., said that a necropsy revealed that the whale shark died due to “fishing nets, speared, dynamite fishing, and plastic ingestion.”

https://www.facebook.com/darrell.blatchley.9/posts/10217070696617224

Blatchley said “nothing changes, the posts get shared, you get the sad faces,” but the trash still gets dropped in the ocean.

The marine biologist told INQUIRER.net that animals will continue to die if people will “not take steps to use discipline with our plastic garbage.”

Blatchley, together with his wife, founded the D’ Bone Collector Museum Inc. in 2012. The museum, which was recognized as the second most unique museum in the country by the Philippine travel tourism, houses the largest collection of 6,000 different specimen in the Philippines.

A 2017 study of environment group Greenpeace found that the Philippines is the third top contributor of plastic waste in the ocean, next to China and Indonesia. The environmental watchdog added that about a truckload of plastic ends up at sea every minute.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources- National Capital Region (DENR-NCR) said they will conduct the 2018 International Coastal Cleanup in several areas in Metro Manila and anyone can join. /ee