Over this last week we have contacted many different organizations including https://4ocean.com , https://www.tdisdi.com/elearning/ , https://conserveturtles.org , and https://www.seeturtles.org . All of these organizations have helped us decide on two main problems we wanted to focus on. The first problem was how plastic pollution affects sea turtles. We researched a lot and found out that a lot of the reason turtles die is because they mistake plastic and other pollution for food. From an email sent from someone who works at Conserve Turtles, we found out that hatchlings when they are born, spend time in sargassum seaweed mats offshore. These mats give them food and protection. But, the mats also collect micro plastics, making hatchlings accidentally eat the plastic. This also happens with adult sea turtles. Sea turtles have downward facing spines making it nearly impossible to regurgitate. Because of that, this plastic makes it really hard for them to swallow and eat. Our second problem included boats crashing into sea turtles and hurting their skulls and bodies. This is a huge issue but a lot broader. It really matters what speed the boat is going at and how large it is. This happens a lot where boats run into sea turtles breaking their skulls and killing them. It’s a massive issue that really isn’t thought about a lot. We came with two solutions. For the first problem, we came up with the idea of during scuba divers routines we have the pick up trash in highly polluted areas where turtles pass through. We will pair with the scuba diving organizations and see if we can get a group if scuba divers to go out to different locations of the coast and pick up trash during their routines. With this solution came a lot of feedback. For example, who is going to do this? How are we going to convince scuba divers to change their routines to help us? What are we going to do about where they go? Many problems came up but, we were able to come up with solutions. We have decided it will be voluntarily. We will pair with one or more organizations along the coast and see how any people would volunteer to go out and do this. For the second problem, we came up with the idea of boat bumpers. Pretty much we get something for the bottom and around the boat that will make the impact a lot less harmful to sea turtles if they crash into a boat. With that solution cam many more problems. How will we convince people to change there boats? How much money will this cost? Do we have the resources to make this? For these problems it was a lot harder to come up with how we would fix our idea with these problems in mind. Because of that, we decided to go with the first idea. We will pair with scuba diving organizations to pretty much do underwater beach clean ups. It will be a start but, we will do it very often, whenever the scuba divers do routines. We still have to find the organization but we have some options. We plan to also talk to some faculty that is involved in scuba diving and the service learning committee about beach clean ups. -Sadie Olmos https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140414-ocean-garbage-patch-plastic-pacific-debris/
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