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Comment by erikig | Hacker News Reader

Just for comparison 6kg of plastic in a 60 ton animal is the same as 6g of plastic in a 60kg organism (or a little above one teaspoon of plastic ingested by a teenager).

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While I understand the comparison you're trying to make, I'm not sure weight is the best estimation here. A whale can be heavier without being larger. While the whale may weigh 1000x more, it appears to be only around 10x as big (sperm whales are 40 feet long, and somewhat wider than humans).

If you take a look at the picture in the article, and analyze what it had ingested: "115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops," it seems much less trivial than a teenager ingesting a teaspoon.

A better comparison would be that, size-wise, it is the same as a teenager ingesting 2.5 plastic bags, 15 drinking cups; that alone seems like enough to cause serious health issues.

Shouldn't we compare by volume, not length?

Worth noting that a greater proportion of a whales body is fat, to deal with the cold cold waters... The size of the digestive system probably isn't quite what one would expect from scaling purely by a volume ratio.

I find it baffling, that parent comment made just a comparison without giving any opinion, and pretty much every sibling comment is telling them they are wrong... lol.

Fascinating how people project their opinions onto others and argue with them. Parent even got called a moron and told to eat a plastic bag xD

Pretty much every one assumed that on a human scale weight it's not that much, though still wrong.

I wonder what's the name for this behaviour.

Not a fair comparison. See[1] how a whales digestive tract can be a fraction of the size of a humans, relative to overall size.

Also 6 grams can be three whole plastics cups - or a dozen lightweight bags, not that neat little teaspoon full.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperm+whale+anatomy&t=ffsb&iar=ima...

Beside what others are saying, this whale does not look like a big sperm whale. According to Wikipedia [1], a 20-meter animal weighs up to 60 tons. This one looks closer to 10 meters and probably weighs less than 15 tons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#External_appearanc...

If I cut your fingers from both hands is about 100g of your anatomy, but the distress for your life is enormous. Even being less than 0.1% of your body mass. So the question here is not about the toxicity vs. body mass. Is about the amount of material in your digestive system.

That's a plastic shopping bag. Try swallowing a plastic shopping bag.

what are you saying...? that whatever toxicity of ingesting plastic is proportional across all living things by weight?

Generally we measure how lethal something is by using an LD 50 that looks at mass of chemical per mass of body. There are exceptions to this, but as a first assumption it seems reasonable.

I don't think toxicity (LD 50) is relevant for plastic consumption. This sort of stuff packs into the gut and doesn't move or decompose. So the animal has to vomit it up or get surgery because it won't move down. I think the relevant comparison is ratio of pyloric sphincter between two species (the exit of the stomach). I'd be curious to know what that ratio is and it might be surprisingly close to one almost certainly less than 10. I do not know what the skill with which a whale can vomit, I do know that my lab mix pup is especially skillful.

To the same extent, the weight or mass of the plastic may not be relevant as well. The shape, density, and strength of the plastic would probably matter much more than the weight.

There could also be a selection bias, the plastic found is what was stuck, smaller parts would have gone the whole way through.

Plastic is effectively nontoxic. The hazard is mechanical (digestive blockages)

weight? really?

Go by the size & volume of the animals' digestive systems. It is the plastics relative to the digestive systems volumes that is the killer.

Agreed, it seemed a trivial quantity for such a large animal.

>Agreed, it seemed a trivial quantity for such a large animal.

Go swallow 6 grams of plastic. Let me know how that works out for you.

To add to your point, a plastic grocery bag weighs in under 6 grams. I don't want that in my body.

It's a very good point and I'm glad the parent raised it. But wouldn't you find it distressing if teenagers were regularly found with a teaspoon full of plastic in their stomachs?

We regularly find teenagers smoke behind the school (at least around here), we don't panic because of it.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=things+found+in+people's+stomachs&...

There is a laxative product that is commonly prescribed to childhood cancer patients that is just polyethylene glycol. You take about a teaspoon of plastic micropellets and stir them up in a glass of water and drink it.

The PEG used for medicine has very short chain lengths, and I would be surprised if it isn't liquid or water-soluble, and not taken in the form of actual micropellets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_glycol

I think we'd be a bit more disturbed if teenagers accidentally ingested the teaspoon full of plastic whilst going about their daily lives and eating their regular diet, especially if the plastic wasn't designed in a way which made it easily pass through the gut.

That would say more about the teenagers than about usage of plastic in the modern world.

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