The Poison of Our Seas

The+Poison+of+Our+Seas

Anareli Hernandez, Staff Writer/Cartoonist

My watercolor painting is explaining how pollution really harms sea animals, especially turtles. Every time you don’t properly dispose of a surgical mask or a plastic bag, you are hurting the environment because that trash travels all the way to the sea and harms the animals there. Turtles are one of the main species that are affected. Whenever they see a plastic bag, they think it’s food because it looks like a jellyfish. When they try to eat it, they only realize that they are tangled and suffocating. I wanted my painting to explain this issue and get people more aware of how polluting our oceans is really harming sea animals to the point where they can go extinct. Now that we are in a pandemic, surgical masks have become a main polluting item in the ocean because everyone is using one and they don’t throw them away properly. I hope that this painting can help people see the danger in littering and make them think whether they really want to purchase a plastic bottle, use a plastic straw, or even reuse that surgical mask one more time. I had so much fun painting this informative art. I hope people like it and become more ecologically aware when they see it!