Brazilian Communities Flourish in Florida: Here’s Why

 

If entanglement is mad acute, it causes, like, an immediate and severe welfare problem, fam. Like, imagine if a marine mammal is, like, totally prevented from resurfacing because it's all tangled up or trapped, it's gonna, like, suffocate and drown. So sad, tbh. This process can take mins to hrs. Asphyxiation can also be caused by like, ligatures around the neck or occlusion in the blowhole of whales (Cassoff et al., 2011). Severance of the carotid artery by ingrown ligatures is like, a big deal for seals (Delong et al., 1990) and whales were totally messed up with bleeding and being super weak because of major tissue damage and laceration of big blood vessels (Cassoff et al., 2011). Like, dying right away can also happen if you can't run away from predators or get hit by a ship (Beck and Barros, 1991; Butterworth et al., 2012). Lmao, being all littered up can seriously mess with your moves and flex.

Litty and mad (long-term) vibes

It can even straight up starve you to death, fam. So, like, tons of people straight up die from getting caught up in ocean trash, ya know? It's like, probs that way more peeps are affected by lowkey bad vibes that haven't been fully spilled (CBD 2012; Gall and Thompson 2015; Kühn et al., 2015). Chronic (sublethal) effects be changing the bio and eco game of an individual over time, stacking up and all that. A bunch of mad whack sublethal effects have been reported, like reduced flex, moves, chow-down skills, and digestion skills. All of dat lead to mad low gains, zero clout, and being stuck AF. Tissue damage is, like, sooo common when you get all tangled up. Skin lesions with ulceration can result (CMS, 2014). Yeet! Death of muscle tissue (necrotising myositis) is also known (Oros et al., 2005). But like, muscle tissue dying is a big oof, ya know? (Oros et al., 2005). Rope and line ligatures can cause major oof or gnarly wounds that leave sites open to infection, which like, totally lowers the chances of survival. Like, in turtles, entanglement is, like, known to result in, like, the loss of flippers. The loss of one flipper seems to have no effect on the animal's range, but losing two flippers seriously cramps its diving and feeding skills, fam. Yo, like, in addition, flipper stumps are, like, hella lit.vulnerable af to more attacks by predators like sharks, birds, or crabs, which can totally mess with the chances of getting infected again or getting eaten (Carrington, 2013).

As the animal grows, rope loops be slicin' into the skin, muscle and sometimes even bone.

 

The fin and tail of whales, dolphins, porpoises, or sharks don't just yeet themselves off, but sometimes their tails can get messed up and look all wonky. If it messes with the midline of the spine, it's like a super serious injury, ya know? (Andersen et al., 2008). The constriction can get hella tight, like enough to yeet arteries and straight up cause strangulation. OMG, whales be flexin' with their mad bone growth, tryna block those tight lines, ya know? (Cassoff et al., 2011) Plastic is, like, hella tough in the ocean, so when a poor animal gets tangled up and dies, the trash can just go back in the water and tangle up another animal. It's, like, so not cool.

The majority of reported encounters by individual marine organisms were with plastic litter, fam. The vibes of impacts be different depending on the material the litter is made of, as well as the type and shape of litter items. OMG, like, over 80% of recorded encounters were all about that plastic litter, while paper, glass, and metal were, like, less than 2% (CBD 2012). #SustainabilityGoals Like, some types of trash are, like, way more likely to cause, like, major entanglement vibes because of their shape, ya know? Yo, like loops or tangled string stuff, like packaging bands, net structures, ropes, cable ties, or plastic bags, are hella risky for getting tangled up, ya know?

OMG, after doing a ton of research, like reading scientific journals, government stuff, NGO reports, beach clean-up websites, and listening to presentations by researchers, Butterworth et al. (2012) found out that the most common things that get tangled up are net pieces, ropes and lines (like fishing nets and stuff), thin fishing lines, those bands that hold packaging together, plastic rings, and packaging like those rings for cans. By peeping the data, first entanglement hotspots were also flexed, like the North Sea for grey seals, minke whales and gannets.

The tea from a study commissioned by the United States National Marine Debris Monitoring Program showed that 32.3% of beach litter from dedicated clean-ups across the US could totally trap animals. 

OMG, out of the nine things that made up this total, the top five were like plastic bags that are less than one meter long, balloons, long ropes, fishing line, and nets (Sheavly, 2007). In the UK, fishing litter like line, nets, buoys, and floats is like the second biggest source of marine litter (MSC, 2007).

Ayo peep this, when you check out the TG ML litter category list, you'll see that 44 outta 217 litter categories are like, hella risky for entanglement (check out Annex I). Most of these are fishing related items, like nets, traps and ropes. Yeet! Occasionally, other stuff can totally cause some major entanglement drama. In general, like, abandoned fishing gear is, like, a major issue when it comes to getting all tangled up in the ocean, you know? The like, estimated 640.000 tons of fishing gear lost, abandoned or discarded annually world-wide may continue to fish for years or even decades, a process referred to as ‘ghost’ fishing (Cheshire et al., 2009). OMG, like, during beach litter surveys in the North-East- Atlantic from 2009-2014, around a third of the litter items were all about fishing activities. It's, like, so cray cray! (OSPAR, Intermediate Assessment 2017, in publication). Around 25k nets may be yeeted or straight up ditched in European fisheries each year with a total length of 1.25k km (Brown et al, 2005). OMG, like WWF said that in the Baltic Sea in 2011, around 5k-10k gill nets were totally lost. So sad, smh. OMG, like scientific research says that ghost nets still have, like, 6-20% of their original fishing power. So wild, right? Gillnets, and traps and pots are like, totally seen as the two types of fishing gear with the biggest risk of ghost fishing (Poseidon Aquatic Resource, 2016).