A pregnant sperm whale whose dead body recently washed up in an Italian tourist hotspot was carrying a whopping 49 pounds of plastic in its gut — along with a dead fetus, according to a new report.
The 26-foot-long carcass appeared on a beach in Porto Cervo, a seaside resort in northern Sardinia, last week, CNN reported.
The body contained “garbage bags … fishing nets, lines, tubes, the bag of a washing machine liquid still identifiable, with brand and barcode … and other objects no longer identifiable,” Luca Bittau, president of the non-profit SeaMe group, told CNN.
“She was pregnant and had almost certainly aborted before [she] beached,” he added. “The fetus was in an advanced state of composition.”
Italy’s environment minister Sergio Costa shared an image of the whale on Facebook.
“Are there still people who say these are not important problems?” he wrote. “For me they are, and they are priorities.”
“We’ve used the ‘comfort’ of disposable objects in a lighthearted way in the past years and now we are paying the consequences,” he added. “Indeed the animals, above all, are the ones paying them.”
European Parliament recently approved a law banning several disposable plastic items, including straws, cups and cotton swabs.
“Italy will be one of the first countries to implement it,” Costa said in the Facebook post. “The war on disposable plastic has begun. And we won’t stop here.”
The whale’s cause of death is pending examinations by veterinarians in the city of Padua.