Short Stuff: Friendly Floatees

the loss of a shipping container at sea. There's this UM insurance company, a marine cargo insurance company called t RG, and they estimate that every year anywhere from to ten thousand shipping containers you know, those big giant shipping containers that double is like an entire semi truck. Up to ten thousand of those just fall overboard into the sea every year. Did they get those out? No? No, they're going it's ten thousand, up to ten thousand these are

falling in every year. Like that's a problem at some point, right, I guess not. I think we shipped that much stuff that they're like, well, these people are gonna have to wait a month and we'll get them some more. No, I mean a problem for the ocean. Ohh, I thought she meant a problem for the consumer. I mean over ten years, Like it's up to a hundred thousand semitruck shipping containers, ten thousand lying on the ocean, ten thousand.

What did I say, No, that's it over ten years though, Oh sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm sure it is a problem. Or um, it's a They always say that, um, A problem is a benefit in disguise, isn't that that saying? So they probably make lemonade out of lemons down there. That's there's a window open. They didn't know about all those metaphors. So you do make a good point this this shipping effects nature. I mean, we talked about in a noise pollution episode just how

bad the shipping industry is for marine ecosystems. That's right, But we're here to talk about one specific container that had the cutest little ecological spill in history. The Ever Laurel was at sea. There was a bad storms Januar. It made it to port, but it lost a container along the way, and that container contained twenty eight thousand rubber duckies, frogs, beavers, and turtles called friendly floaties, and the doors opened and they were all released into the ocean,

and that amazing. So these friendly float ees um there. There was some point moments after this, this disaster happened where all twenty eight thousand, almost twenty nine thousand friendly floaties, rubber duckies, rubber turtles, we're all just floating together in this one very local area of the sea. No human as far as we know, saw this. So you can just say, you have to imagine it in your mind's eye, but it's easy to do, and it's it's delightful in

a way. It is delightful. But then they started to disperse, of course, because they're in the ocean, and of the twenty eight thousand nineteen thousand went south and started showing up in places like Australia and Indonesia. UM. Some others went across the Southern Pacific and west to South America, and the rest headed north. And it's cute, but it is an environmental disaster. Somebody wrote a book called Moby Duck,

which is even cuter. But another guy named Dr Curtis Ebbsmire said, you know what, I'm gonna make some limit out of this because I study ocean currents, and all of a sudden I have twenty eight thousand little specimens floating around, and I can see if I'm right about what I think the currents due down there. Yeah, because those oceanographers usually use like booie transmitters, and those things are expensive and difficult to distribute and put out to see.

Now they had twenty eight thousand of these things that they could basically use his stand ins for those booties, as long as you could kind of keep track of them. But Absmire went the other route. He's like, no, I'm gonna make predictions based on my models, and then we'll see if these things turn up where the models predict. And starting in nine six he predicted that, um, the first friendly floaties would start showing up in Washington State. I think he was a you dub professor, UM, so

he talked about Washington specifically, and he was correct. They started showing up in nine and that definitely caught the attention of the media from that point on. I wonder if when it happened he was like, oh man, I've been wanting to release thirty rubber duckies for years now, and they just won't let me do it because it's not safe. Uh. I would guess he had those fantasies in his darkest moments. So let's take a break and think about that, and uh, come back and talk more

about this. The Q just ecological disaster of all time. So they found the first ones of these in sit Alaska at the end of and then I think, you know, it took months and years for things, these things to kind of wash all over the world. And this was this was that guy's big chance, what's his name, Dr Curtis Ebbsmire, ebbs Meier's chance to see if his predictions are right. You're right, and he was right. Remember he started predicting him that they would show up in Washington.

He's right about the first one. I didn't see how right he was about the rest. He was right about the rest almost exactly. Like one of the great triumphs of the Friendly Floaty Saga is that um Dr Curtis ebbsmires um models, where like these things are dead on it actually advanced oceanography as far as I can tell.

So a lot of them ended up, like you said, all over the world, but the ones that really kind of gripped everybody the most were the ones that ended up in the North Atlantic up near Scandinavia and then

eventually down to the UK. And the reason that these are so gripping is because they think that those are the ones that moved northward from this um wreck site and they went up past Alaska where the first ones are found, up into the Arctic, where they became frozen and ice, and because of the the conveyor belt by ocean currents even up that far north, the ice eventually

moved its way eastward. And then as the ice got into warmer and warmer waters, that started to melt, which freed those friendly floaties, which means that they made their own kind of reverse northwest passage through the Arctic, which people have been trying to do for hundreds of years. Now they're friendly float He's figured out, you just have to get trapped in ice for ten years. Yeah, Like they should not probably have gone north to come south

into Europe normally. Like, there's no way you predicted that, right, I believe he did, really, Yes, he predicted that they would start showing up in um in the UK about ten years after the disaster, and they did, And I think it was because he had predicted they would go

north and it would take that long to make it across. Well, another good thing about this whole thing was that it did bring some more attention to the Great Pacific garbage Patch, something we talked about in the very early days of stuff you should know. Uh that may not have even been me. It was, of course the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Uh and we talked about that garbage patch a few times, I think, but uh, some of them obviously made their way there and just became a part of that disaster.

And uh So anytime a little bit of media attention is going to come that that way, that's a good thing. Yeah. Between that guy Donovan Hones book Moby Duck and Curtis ebbsmires uh press that he got from his models and predictions, I feel like that might have been what introduced the average person or the media to the Great Pacific garbage paths. I think this may have been what did it actually, because it really alerted people to just how long plastic

lasts in the ocean. Because those ones that entered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they're never going to make land. They're gonna stay stuck in that circular current and then over time they're just gonna break down. Further and further into smaller and smaller plastic. It doesn't biodegrade at photodegrades,

so chemically speaking, it keeps. It never breaks apart. It just gets smaller and smaller, and then it enters the food chain and once it's in there, it sticks around for a really long time, like hundreds and hundreds of years, which that's where that ecologic Old disaster a part came from. Right, I think that these things were supposed to he I think, he said, besides those that are out there forever. He said, I think the last ones will probably wash up somewhere

in the UK. And you looked into his crystal ball and said maybe two thousand seven, And there was one found in Cornwall in two thousand seven, so he's right about that. And they've become kind of hot tickets on eBay, right, yeah, I think at least a grand is the most that's been paid for one that's definitely a first Year's Friendly floaty that was in that shipping container. What do you do with that thing though, that you paid a thousand dollars for? You hope somebody comes over and notices it

on the shelf and just conversation starter. I guess I gets. I don't know why else you would want to possess it, And there there's like a whole group of beach combers. It's like a really big deal that I think that that would be a prize. But I think being a beach comer, you'd want to find it yourself rather than buying it on eBay. Who knows. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not gonna look anyone's yung. No, definitely not. If you need that to get a good conversation going in

your life and more pepper to you. You got anything else? I got nothing else? Okay, Well that's it for short stuff everybody. And that's it for friendly floaties because they've all made land or photodegraded into almost nothing by now. And since I said that short stuff is out. Stuff you should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.