News from the Natural World: A Whale would rather risk swimming in a Croc infested river than swimming in the disgusting plastic-filled ocean.
Last week a large humpback whale that took a wrong turn into a crocodile-infested river in Australia. The whale was first seen in the Northern Territory (NT) river over a week ago, prompting fears it may get stuck in shallow waters, hit a boat or even worse eaten by crocodiles. However, the whale eventually managed to find its way out over the weekend during high tides. This is the first known instance of humpback whales in the river in the Kakadu National Park. If the whale had been stranded on a sandbar the big crocs would likely have begun their feast and eaten the hapless creature alive. The humans couldn’t work out why the whale had decided to head up the estuary and risk it with the crocs but the Platypus managed to secure an interview with the whale.
Guriwal the Whale said that “At least you know where you stand with a Croc. The snappy bugger is gonna take a bite out of your flipper if they get a chance, but equally, it gives me a chance to swim off or whack them with my tail. It’s a fair fight in my eyes. In comparison, we really don’t stand a chance with micro-plastics and ocean waste. If I wasn’t swallowing up to 5 plastic bags a day I’d call it the invisible enemy but in truth, the ocean is absolutely full of human rubbish.”
Whale would rather swim with crocs than plastic
So it turned out that Guriwal the Whale had deliberately swum up the crocodile-infested to get a break from the horror and filth of the ocean. In fact, the human toll on the ocean is colossal. Three times as much oil is carried out to sea via runoff from human roads, rivers and drainpipes. In addition, there is more plastic than fish in the ocean. To be exact it is around eight million metric tons. That’s how much plastic humans dump into the oceans each year. That’s about 17.6 billion pounds — or the equivalent of nearly 57,000 blue whales — every single year. We can see why Guriwal fancied a little break from all that pollution;