It’s never good when a bunch of junk spills into the ocean and washes onto shore. It ultimately means that we humans have failed at some point along the way, contributing to the degradation of our home planet with some toxic junk we carelessly tossed about. But, occasionally, the blow of that existential dread is softened when the thing that washes ashore is cute and whimsical.
According to an article from Houston Public Media, Texas beaches are getting periodic waves of what locals have started calling “sea pigs,” plastic piggy banks that have been washing ashore by the dozens along the Gulf Coast.
Some of these things look fresh from the factory. Bright pink, blue, and yellow piggy banks, some still sealed with the little plastic tab over the coin slot, are showing up tangled in thick mats of sargassum seaweed. One person surveying 13 miles of Texas coastline documented 14 piggy banks in a single trip and says he’s personally recovered more than 60 over the last year. Reports have spread across the Gulf Coast.
Where Are All the Sea Pigs Coming From?
Researchers think many of the piggy banks were manufactured in the Dominican Republic, which means their likely origin point is somewhere in the Caribbean. As for how they all could’ve ended up in the ocean, theories suggest a shipping container that shook loose and wound up in the ocean, or, more depressingly, it was just straight up dumped into a body of water connected to the ocean, like a river, carried them out to sea.
The Gulf’s Loop Current, which moves trash across massive distances, is doing most of the heavy lifting, dragging the piggy banks across the Gulf and onto shores across Texas, a state that, thanks to its position along those current pathways, reportedly gets way more marine trash than other Gulf states.
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