Caitlin Bovery, sea turtle rehabilitation assistant coordinator, records a video of Gumbo Limbo senior aquarist Keith Herman
and manager Leanne Welch as they dump plastic bottles into the center’s near-shore reef aquarium.
The bottles, 70 pounds’ worth, were collected from the beach and surrounding areas. The intent was
to show visitors how plastic and other debris create floating patches of garbage in oceans.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Steve Plunkett
First, numbers from the “Marine Debris Timeline” exhibit at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center:
• Two to four weeks: how long it takes a banana peel or paper cup to decompose in the ocean.
• 10 to 20 years: the time a plastic shopping bag lingers in the water.
• 450 years: the long life in the Atlantic Ocean of a disposable diaper.
The numbers helped frame four days of special activities at Boca Raton’s wildlife sanctuary as center personnel observed World Oceans Day on June 8. The celebration included a coastal cleanup, the “trashing” of an aquarium with plastic bottles and creating a “blanket” of Mylar balloons collected from the city’s beaches.
Ali Courtemanche and Sydney Jimenez, marine turtle specialists at Gumbo Limbo, needed only a week to gather 53 Mylar balloons left over from beach parties. Taped together, the balloons, which take 50 to 100 years to disintegrate, formed a blanket 21 feet long and 5 feet wide.
World Oceans Day is intended to raise awareness of how manmade debris affects marine life. The marquee event at Gumbo Limbo was a contest to guess how much plastic was floating in the center’s near-shore reef aquarium.
In a media-only event that Gumbo Limbo posted on its Facebook page, workers dumped tubs of plastic into the octagon-shaped pool.
“That was really cool, something we have never done before,” environmental program coordinator Kristin Child said. “We just emptied 70 pounds of plastic bottles and assorted plastic containers into our near-shore reef aquarium, and it is floating around like the Pacific gyre,” an ocean garbage patch.
Gumbo Limbo senior aquarist Keith Herman said the 70 pounds equaled one-tenth of the amount of plastic that humans drop into oceans around the globe each second.
Herman decorated the center of the adjacent mangrove aquarium with 34.2 pounds of debris he picked up in just one hour walking on a path to the Intracoastal mangroves on the center’s property. He did not have to cover much ground to collect it.
“I went within 20 to 30 feet on either side,” Herman said.
Laura Reams, visiting from Maryland, came closest out of about 400 entries in guessing how many bottles were dumped in the Great Gumbo Garbage Patch.
“She guesses 1,282 and the actual number was 1,306,” Child said.
Reams’ prize was to become the adoptive mother of a sea turtle at Gumbo Limbo. Visitors usually donate $50 to adopt a resident turtle or $25 to adopt a hatchling.
All the plastic in the aquarium was removed and recycled.
“Please reduce, reuse, and recycle … you can make a difference!” the center urged its Facebook friends.
Lanai Robinson, who made up the one-woman Team Honeybee, collected a winning 254 pieces of trash in the six-hour coastal cleanup contest June 10.
“We did not go with weight, because it is easy to pick up big things and harder to pick up the small things,” Child said.
Robinson won a package of reusable water bottles, gloves, grabbers and sunscreen, so she could continue her cleanup work.
The Gumbo Limbo efforts were echoed the following Tuesday in City Hall.
Margaret FitzSimons and Cristina Hicks, the chair and vice chair of Boca Raton’s Green Living Advisory Board, asked City Council members to stop the use of plastic trash bags at the beaches.
“This really undermines all of the work that Gumbo Limbo is doing to try to eliminate plastic just from our consumer cycle. It ends up in our oceans, and turtles think they’re jellyfish; they end up eating them. And we’re putting more turtles at the hospital at Gumbo Limbo because of that,” Hicks said.
She and FitzSimons also asked that recycle bins be placed at the beaches.
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