A female diver risked it all to help one of the largest animals in the world. Robby Melville and Lorien Cleavinger of Globetrotting Baes, a pair who host small group trips into the wild, were somewhere in the Indian Ocean when they noticed the regular pristine waters were covered with plant debris and garbage. Diving to take a look at and photograph a sperm whale, Cleavinger realized its head and mouth were enmeshed in a bunch of trash. Feeling concerned, she swam up to the creature and raced against the clock to remove it.
“I was honestly nervous,” the diver wrote on Instagram. “I’d never been this close to a Sperm whale and had certainly never considered putting my hands in [one’s] mouth. I braced maybe against her and started to remove the debris. The part shown here in the video was the ‘easy part’ as I didn’t really have to put my hand super close to her teeth where she could close her jaw on my hand.”
While intimidated by its teeth and overall size of the whale, Cleavinger soon realized there was no need to be afraid, as the animal seemed relaxed and cooperative while she removed the first big pieces. The diver returned to the surface for one gasp of air, and quickly went back to the whale’s side, getting the trash that was further down her throat. “Again I was a bit nervous, but she barely moved and let me reach in to remove the last of the trash,” Cleavinger recalls.
As if thanking the diver, the whale hung around her and her group for a while, swimming slowly enough to allow Cleavinger and Melville to snorkel alongside them. “She rolled around multiple times, checking us both out and was quite chatty,” the diver says. “Once she stopped we just stared at each other for a while before we all went our own ways. These moments were very special, but also heartbreaking.”
The UN Environment Program estimates that every year, between 11 and 14 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the ocean, with 80% of pollution coming from land-based sources, such as city landfills, that are carried by rivers and winds. The whale this diver encountered represents a minuscule fraction of all the animals affected by human actions. While upsetting, this should serve as a wakeup call about how endangered animals can be directly hurt by the mismanagement of our waste, regardless of where we are in the world.
Diver Lorien Cleavinger risked it all to help a sperm whale that had trash stuck in its mouth and throat.
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Sources: Woman uses her bare hands to save starving whale; From Pollution to Solution
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