It’s world Turtle Day today. The search bar in Google and the Windows setup are both reserved for today. Turtle conservation is a national obligation. Turtles are your responsibility since that is the race you came from in the ancient. Safeguard them.
Even the plastic circles around the lids of the bottles you toss away are like the rings that form around the bellies of little turtles and bird beaks when they go to sea. When these plastic circles stay in the whales’ young and little fish’s fins, these animals often get stuck in the plastic and die because the plastic does not grow them during the growing stage. Furthermore, shopping bags float like translucent jellyfish in the water. Turtles eat jellyfish on a regular basis. When these turtles consume shopping bags, their digestive system remains dormant, and they die. This is not limited to turtles; it applies to all water creatures.
We need to protect the environment, and the animal community from plastics, and other garbage. But we cannot say they do not use plastic as a solution because no one in this world can be non-plastic / zero-plastic by now. However, we can state that plastic should not be discarded on the road or in the sea once it has been used. So don’t let your plastics influence the fate of innocent lives in the world.
Janith Chathuranga
Faculty of Science
University of Colombo