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I'm very sorry to read this piece of news. I think the probable cause is mentioned in the article: "PCBs and other toxins polluting Puget Sound build up in the bodies of the whales, leading to increased illness and reproductive problems".
This is so sad. Humans (probably) to blame again.....
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12-09-2014, 10:39 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2014, 10:45 AM by Tobi.)
We are putting far too many toxins into the oceans. What on earth caused us to start using the oceans as rubbish bins??
But of course, it is all about ill-managed 'excreta' of a massive population of human life, which eventually ends up in the oceans. Believe it -if someone somewhere was willing to spend a little more money, then there would probably not be such a crisis for marine life such as these Whales.
And it's a question of caring enough to do something about it.
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I think that's the hardest thing. You're never going to get people to stop using PCPs and many people don't give a second thought to where they end up once you've used them.
The Antarctica article shocked me the most. You think of Antarctica as this pristine environment, relatively untouched by man. Yet you have these scientists just willingly and carelessly dumping their effluent into the surrounding oceans. These are supposed to be leading scientists. And then innocent beings like Rhapsody and her calf end up paying the ultimate price.
The research centre in Churchill, Manitoba might be the opposite end of the world, but they have no trouble recycling all of their waste water, including human waste.
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Thank-you for finding follow-up articles. They do clarify things a lot.
It does look like it is human pollution that is the cause of Rhapsody's death and her calf. It is cheep and easy to just dump pollution right into the ocean. People in the city flush everything. They don't ask where it goes. The waste is dumped in the ocean(or lake) and we don't ask where it goes. People for years have thought of waste as somehow being gone once we dump it. We see the results in the whales and other marine life now. We don't realize that this will affect us too.
I don't know if we can save the Southern Resident Killer whales. It would have to be part of a change of behavior in a number of areas.
Why do our shampoos need such powerful chemicals. Simple natural products are the best and have the least impart on the environment.
Catherine