Our Plastic Oceans - Kaitlyn Reed

Prior to reading this article, Our Plastic Oceans, I did not know how bad the pollution was and how badly it affects the marine life. In the first section (How bad is the pollution?) the writer talks about how a garbage truck's worth of plastic comes into the world's oceans every minute. I am not sure about anyone else, but I did not know it was actually that much. I knew that plastic was somehow making its way to our oceans, but I did not know that it was that much. I also did not know that it impacted the marine life the way it does.  In the section (Is it affecting marine life?) the writer says that researchers found that "fish raised in with heavy concentrations of microplastic are "smaller, slower and more stupid" than normal fish," which means that it is affecting fish as they are being developed. They also said that a more obvious happening due to plastic is the whales that have died because they ingested plastic and it prevented them from digesting food. The writer cited World Economic Forum, saying that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, which is very devasting because not only will it be hurting the marine life but also the animals that may eat the fish will lose a food source. This all really shocked me because I may have known that the plastic was hurting the oceans and its marine life, but I did not realize it was on such a large scale.