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A female argonaut sometimes hitches a ride on a jellyfish as protection against predators at sea. Also known as paper nautilus because of the thin shells that females secrete, the argonaut is a species of octopus that drifts in the open ocean.
Besides its strange beauty, an argonaut recently made rounds on social media after a blackwater photographer uploaded a photo of the cephalopod, this time not clinging to a jellyfish but to a plastic candy wrapper.
“It’s kind of ironic that you have this plastic waste, this marine creature carrying it along, and it’s got this smiley face on it,” said Wayne Jones, the diver and photographer who took the photo in the waters off Anilao, Batangas.
Jones said he first noticed the wrapper because of its pretty colors and the smiling face on the packaging. He also noticed algae, which may indicate that the wrapper had been floating in the ocean for quite some time.
The photographer is based in Anilao, a popular diving destination in the country. Originally from Australia, whose culture, he said, is very much “by the sea,” Jones reignited his hobby of diving when he relocated to the Philippines and married a Filipino who owns a dive resort.
Jones had visited a number of dive spots in the country and said this scenario is not unusual. “It’s just a pity,” he said.
CLINGING WRAPPER. Australian diver Wayne Jones, who has dived in other spots in the Philippines, too, says this scenario is not unusual. Photo by Wayne JonesThe image of a sea creature entangled in plastic is not new, but it never fails to prompt a visceral response from the audience — a mix of guilt and helplessness in the face of a plastic crisis.
According to government figures, Filipinos use 163 million plastic sachets a day. Because plastics don’t degrade easily — not for a million years, at least — they end up clogging landfills, rivers, and oceans and even digested by marine creatures that humans would, in turn, consume.
Around the world, there’s already an acknowledgment that the plastic crisis will need institutional intervention, especially from manufacturers, to be addressed. Otherwise, recycling and reusing at an individual or household level will not be enough to curb a problem that involves even the unknowing argonaut.
Adopting a zero-waste lifestyle has its limits. Meanwhile, the crisis seems boundless.
Two years have passed since the Philippine government passed the extended producer responsibility law, which requires manufacturers to recover the same amount of plastic they put out.
The idea is to make manufacturers think about the full life cycle of their products and not simply put the products out, which then subsequently becomes waste.
At least 64 out of 115 obliged enterprises have submitted their compliance audit reports as of December 31, 2024, according to the Philippine environment department’s Environmental Management Bureau. The level of compliance, according to these reports, has yet to be disclosed, however.
There’s a huge cost to the unabated reliance on plastic — and there is also a cost to creating alternatives that could be as cheap. It takes time; it would require scale for many manufacturers to follow suit.
“The challenge is…if we can provide scale for, let’s say, the use of mono-material across the industry,” said Jose Uy III, corporate affairs head at Nestlé, during a press conference on January 23.
“Then the cost of this material for flexible packaging will [be] reduced,” he added.
Uy, who joined officials at the launch of the National Plastic Action Partnership, explained that the transition from multi-material to mono-material packaging makes products ready for recycling.
Are current efforts enough and urgent?
Like any modern problem involving climate and the environment, battling plastic pollution is a race against time.
The world is inundated with plastic. Over 400 million tons of plastic are produced every year, and about 75 to 199 million tons are floating about in our oceans. Rivers have become conduits for this moving garbage.
Until now, negotiations for a legally binding global plastics treaty are ongoing. Nations were supposed to reach an agreement in Busan, South Korea, last December but failed to do so.
Environment Undersecretary Jonas Leones had said that the new plastic partnership between the public and private sectors would help the Philippines strengthen its position in the global plastics talks.
In Busan, the Philippines stood its ground that the use of primary plastic polymers (used for creating plastic products) must be reduced and the projected tripling of plastic waste by 2060 must be prevented.
While progress in the negotiations is stalled, the shadow of the Trump presidency looms. Already, United States President Donald Trump withdrew the superpower from the landmark Paris Agreement.
Nonprofit organization Greenpeace Philippines warned that the Trump presidency poses “a serious threat to achieving a strong global plastic treaty.”
“His domestic policies foreshadow a weaker, antagonistic approach that could see the US blocking targets for plastic production cuts and phaseout of highly problematic, single-use/short-lived plastics and hazardous chemicals,” said Marian Ledesma, Greenpeace campaigner.
Argonauts protect their eggs in the paper-thin shells they secrete. They use the egg case to trap air, which then helps them stay buoyant enough to propel themselves in the vast deep.
This octopus’ name carries the stuff of legends. In Greek mythology, the argonauts were heroes that helped Jason get the Golden Fleece in Colchis.
Beautiful and enigmatic, especially in the dark, argonauts are considered at low risk of extinction.
In blackwater photography, divers suspend lights in a flotation device and photograph the things that the lights attract. Sea creatures are illumined by the lights, their kaleidoscopic colors in full display against the backdrop of the pitch-black ocean deep.
Jones said they would normally drop in the water around 7 pm. The sea at night, he said, is relaxing and therapeutic. Save for a few stings across the lip from a jellyfish, Anilao waters are safe in the dark.
“You can only see what the light reveals in front of you as you swim along,” Jones said.
As it happened, at 7:22 pm on January 25, what was in front of him was the argonaut — and the pink candy wrapper it got entangled with. – Rappler.com
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