Watch your step. Pollution crossing. By Silvia Phenora

At one point my family and I camped at Padre Island National Seashore. With a beach home to Kemps Ridley, the smallest and most endangered Sea Turtle in the world, it seemed a nice place to go. It was, with good scenery, a loooong beach, and a nice campground. 
While staying there, I found a hatched Sea Turtle egg(we gave it to the Ranger exhibit) and we learned interesting facts. Like, did you know that there is a coral that lives there that looks just like electrical wire? The coral come in pink and yellow, is long and thin, and appears to be a copper wire with a coating. In fact, the Park Rangers warned us before we went to the beach to pick up trash not to pick up coral instead! A way to tell if it's coral or wire is to take a good look at the side. Do you see little pores? If so, that's coral you found.

(Above: Wire....? Nope, coral.)

We also learned of Man-O-War, a creature that appears to be a Jellyfish. WRONG!
It is actually four different animals working together. However, the Man-O-War still has a nasty sting.
And so, knowledgable about coral, and knowing to avoid the Man-O-War who lived there, we set off to the beach to pick up trash. We had heard that the beach was full of trash, because of people throwing it off of ships, but nothing could have prepared us for the sight of it.
Trash....EVERYWHERE. All you could see on the sand other than the occasional Man-O-War or coral was trash.
We got out our bags and got to work. And we worked for about an hour, still picking up trash.
Occasionally, we found a piece of coral, a plastic bottle cap, a baby's pacifier, a trash bag, even dangerious used needles. But the saddest things were the plastic bottles.
It had been explained to us earlier that floating plastic bottles were often mistaken for Jellyfish by the Kemps Ridley and bitten by the hungry creatures, as Jellyfish are part of their diet. Thus, they ingested plastic, which you can probably imagine is not good for their digestive system. We were told that if we saw a diamond-shaped mark in the bottle, it meant that a Kemps Ridley had bitten it with their sharp beaks.

(Above: Sea Turtle bite marks in a plastic container)

Finally, we stopped for our picnic, and surveyed our work.
We had cleared about a mile in a whole hour.
Groan.
That experience really opened our eyes to how much a seemingly little action of throwing something off a ship can do.
Please recycle, and protect our beaches.