The Friendly Floatee Fiasco
Sometimes environmental disasters aren’t all bad…Introducing Friendly Floatees; small ducks, frogs and turtles that are fun for kids and oceanographers alike.
In 1992 a ship carrying a container of plastic bath-time kids toys ended up caught in a storm, resulting in close to 30,000 ‘Friendly Floatees’ being released into the pacific ocean, along with 60,000 Nike shoes
and other various items. Unlike the Nike shoes, the Friendly Floatees were designed to float in the water, and so an army of plastic toys were bid to wander the ocean whilst the shoes sank to the bottom.
The release of these bath-time toys caught the attention of two oceanographers in particular; Curtis Ebbesmyer and James Ingraham of Seattle. These two were working to map what is known as the ‘Ocean Surface Wave Model’ which is used to predict ocean current patterns. Previously the two oceanographers had been releasing drift bottles, which are basically scientific versions of message-in-a-bottle’s. These are generally expensive to release and have only around a 2% recovery rate. The release of 30,000 toys was therefore the oceanographer goldmine, as a 2% recovery still gave a prediction of 600 to be recovered. This combined with The First Years Inc. (the company that made the toys) offering a reward for anyone who found one, lead to close to 800 toys being recovered and mapped.
This incident luckily ended up being beneficial to science, but only through luck. What question this does raise is how many containers carrying tons of stuff other than floating toys are released into the oceans every year that are just ignored? I should imagine it’s more than anyone would care to admit.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees
- http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140722-odd-objects-reveal-ocean-secrets
- http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2014/05/friendly-floatees-what-29000-yellow-ducks-red-beavers-blue-turtles-and-green-frogs-tells-us-about-ocean-dumping/
Jordan Clements 