A photograph of an unfortunate pike fish is going viral for all the wrong reasons right now.
As depicted quite horrifyingly in a series of photographs by Facebook user Adam Turnbull, who is from Ontario, the fish has a plastic ring around it.
Clearly quite tight around its abdomen, it appears the fish got stuck inside it when it was smaller and younger, and it’s now growing around it. Turnbull, an angler, says that the ring is from a Powerade wrapper, something “which takes up no room in your pocket until you get to a garbage can.”
The post was “meant to raise awareness”, and judging from the amount of shares it has already, it’s worked.
Plastic pollution is one of the major environmental issues of our time. There are country-sized plastic islands in several of the world’s major oceans, and much of it will take hundreds of years to degrade. We’re producing so much that it’s already changing the geological record.
Often, small plastic parts are either found constricting marine wildlife or they’re observed digesting it. Seeing as we eat many of the fish that consume our plastic, it’s safe to say that we are slowly reaping the whirlwind of our actions.
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