Are you sick of hearing about plastic straws? Andrew Santino, a comedian, doesn't think that plastic straws are hurting sea turtles even though a video went viral for a scientist pulling a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nose in Costa Rica. Four months later, the same scientist pulled a plastic fork from a sea turtle's nose about 70 kilometres from the original site.
In this episode of the "How to Protect the Ocean" podcast, host Andrew Lewin discusses the influence of comedy on public perception, particularly regarding the anti-single-use plastic movement. He begins by referencing a stand-up bit by comedian Andrew Santino, who humorously questions the narrative surrounding plastic straws and their impact on sea turtles. Santino's comedic approach raises concerns for Lewin, who worries that audiences may take such jokes seriously and dismiss the real issues of plastic pollution.
Lewin emphasizes that while comedy can be entertaining, it can also perpetuate misinformation. He highlights the viral incident of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nose, which became a symbol for the dangers of single-use plastics. Despite the comedic dismissal of such incidents, Lewin argues that they are significant and represent a larger problem of plastic pollution affecting marine life.
The episode underscores the power comedians hold in shaping public discourse. Lewin points out that many people rely on comedians for information, which can lead to misunderstandings about environmental issues. He expresses concern that jokes trivializing the impact of plastics may lead to apathy or skepticism about the anti-single-use plastic movement.
Ultimately, Lewin calls for a deeper understanding of the issue, urging listeners to recognize plastic straws as a gateway to the broader problem of plastic pollution. He invites feedback from the audience on their thoughts regarding the role of comedy in environmental advocacy, highlighting the need for accurate communication in the fight against plastic waste.
Video of Sea Turtle with Plastic Straw in its nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wH878t78bw&t=401s
Video of Sea Turtle with Plastic Fork in its nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRiTABRQOjk&t=8s
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They took away straws in California. They made them illegal in some states to serve. It's insane. And they took them away, and we were like, all right, no one asked for proof. No one was like, why are you doing this? And they threw away, they go, uh, turtles, turtles are dying. And we just were like, oh, okay, seems reasonable. Does it? Where? Where are all these turtles? I'm almost 40, I've seen six turtles my whole life. You're telling me millions of turtles are dying with straws lodged in their heads? - That was a clip from comedian Andrew Santino's stand up comedy that I came across on a YouTube short. And I have a fundamental problem with the way he goes about talking about how a plastic straw would end up in a sea turtle. Now I get it, it's a comedy bit, and it's supposed to be funny, and it kind of is. I totally get what he's saying. But as a scientist, and as a science communicator, I worry that people take comedians a little too seriously, and that we put a lot in what they say. We believe in what they say when they start to come out with stuff like this. And that is concerning to me as a scientist and a science communicator. We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. And this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And if you are here for the first time or the second or the third, you are here in the right place. This is your ocean resource to find out what you need to know about ocean conservation, marine biology, science, how to protect the ocean. That's what this place is for. And you can get more information over at speakupforglue.com. That's the place. On that website, speakupforglue.com is the place to get more information, more podcast episodes, more videos, more information on the ocean. And if you want to get information to your inbox Monday to Friday, you can do so by signing up and going up to speakupforglue.com/newsletter. Speakupforglue.com/newsletter. Every day Monday to Friday, I send you the latest podcast episodes, the latest videos that we've put up, the latest clips from interviews, put out I send you three new ocean news items and articles that I found on the internet, as well as three new jobs that are available in ocean conservation if that interests you as well. So speakupforglue.com/newsletter is where you go. Now today, I am going to be talking about how comedy influences communication and messaging and how as a society, we put a lot into our comedians these days. We expect them to be able to push the envelope a little bit in terms of political correctness, but we also have them tow a very fine line and they can't cross that line. There are some comedians that are very out to do that shock value comedy and there's others that are traditional and kind of do a little bit of a play on words or people who do a lot of dad jokes and there's comedians for everybody out there. Now obviously, comedy can go really well and it can go really badly. Like we've seen recently in political news, we saw that right before the election that there was a comedian that went up and spoke for Trump's rally, but talked about how there is an island of trash out there, thinking everybody's thinking, oh, the Pacific jire, the plastic island, but then started talking about how Puerto Rico is the insinuate that Puerto Rico is trash and obviously didn't hit well as it shouldn't have been done on a political landscape like it was in front of pretty much the entire country. It went viral obviously. That comedian probably took a hit from a political standpoint as well as just sort of like human decency standpoint. Now, some people argue that if he said that in a comedy club, people would have understood. Either way, didn't love the joke, not a lot of people did, but like I said, comedy can go really badly. People hired him as a comedian and a roasting comedian, a guy who goes up and roasts other people so insults other people for fun and like that's what people expect of him, not making excuses, but that's what they hired him for. They just didn't do their due diligence and didn't think it would probably land that badly, which was awful, but comedians all over the place, they can go up and they can go down and sometimes they're really great and some people have a little bit more crass in their humor and people, some people like it, some people don't, but you get to, you know, go and watch whoever you want. And this comedian that I'm talking about today, Andrew Santino, I think he's a funny comedian in certain aspects, obviously I'm never, you know, nobody, everybody's joke, like all the jokes that a comedian puts out, not all of them land with certain people and others. Like I said before, he does a few racial jokes, I'm not a huge fan of, other jokes he says I like and so I kind of go back and forth, but he's in my feed for my YouTube shorts and it came across this one clip from one of his comedy specials and I'll link to it in the show notes. This is YouTube short that I found and it was really interesting because he's talking about how the plastic in a turtle doesn't add up and he's referring to the plastic straw that ended up in a sea turtles nose a number of years ago. This is as I was starting my podcast, I believe and there was a video that went viral and I actually know the people who've not only filmed the video but took the plastic straw out of the poor turtles nose. Just a quick situation, a quick story of what happened. So there was a research crew off the coast of Costa Rica just along the coastline. They were looking at sampling and catching and tagging all of Ridley sea turtles. Dr. Christine Figner was one of the researchers that filmed this incident and Dr. Nathan Robinson was out on the boat on the crew just helping out as well as looking for information on his study at the time and we had both of the, I've had both of the Christine as well as Nathan a number of times on the podcast to talk about that situation. Nathan was the first one to come on and he talked about the whole ordeal and sort of he went through that ordeal and he's obviously the video went insanely wild and it started a new movement of ending single use plastics and the plastic straw became that symbol to say hey, that image of plastic straw being pulled out of a sea turtles nose and the blood that came out of the nose, it was pretty graphic, the blood that came out of the nose and you can see how much in pain that sea turtle was in, right? That caused a lot of concern and people use that, this plastic straw as a symbol for single use plastics and how we need to stop using single use plastics, how we can get into the ocean and how we can get into a sea turtles body. Now why do we care so much about sea turtles? One, they're an iconic species. They're found, they're seven species, they're found all over the world. They are just gorgeous when you look at them that people just love them because of the sheer size of them, the way they move, people love turtles, but also that all seven of them are endangered in some sort of way. And over the last 20 or 24 years, we've really come to understand how far they've traveled with GPS technology and the way that it is and tagging technology in the way that it is. The first tag, the first seetural ever tag, which was a friend of the podcast, may he rest in peace, Dr., oh gosh. Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, him and his team tagged a sea turtle and they watched it go from Baja, California to Japan and then back across the Pacific and back. That's how we realize how far the sea turtles travel, how important they will be in every habitat that they land and that they visit on the way there and back from their journey and how a lot of sea turtles come back to where they nest for a reason. All of really sea turtles off the coast of Costa Rica, they come to a specific Costa Rican beaches in the hundreds and they come in and they lay their eggs and then they go off again. And it's a tourist attraction right now, an eco tourist attraction watching all these sea turtles come in and people can walk around as long as they don't disturb the sea turtles and they can watch all these sea turtles lay eggs. But it's a very delicate procedure. You don't want to scare off the sea turtles, you want to make sure that they come in and I don't know what the regulations are around sea turtle nesting season for all of Ridley's off the coast of Costa Rica. But after the incident of the sea turtle with the straw in its nose and taken out, four months later, Nathan contacted me and he said, "Hey, Andrew, remember when you said if there's ever a, remember when you asked me what are the chances of a sea turtle having a straw in its nose?" And I said it was like a million or two million to one because we've never seen it before. When he goes four months later, 70 kilometers down the beach, I saw, I actually pulled out a plastic fork from a sea turtle and all of Ridley again in the 70 kilometers south of where they were. So obviously it just doesn't happen once, it happens at least twice, we know, but it could happen a lot more, we just don't know why. And there was some, so Nathan put a video out saying, "Hey, we think there's a reason why, you know, it's all of Ridley's sea turtles and we haven't seen other sea turtles. All of Ridley's sea turtles tend to be a little bit more adventurous in the type of food that they eat. They are omnivores, they eat shrimp. And they think that when a fork or a plastic fork or a plastic straw that is in the water column will get bent out of shape at some point because it's pretty rough out in the ocean, the salt can break down the plastic a little bit, the sun can break down the plastic. And so, you know, a plastic straw that is bent could look like a shrimp, you know, like that hook kind of thing, as well as a plastic fork could look like a shrimp. The olive Ridley's sea turtle goes after it, takes a bite of it to test it out to see what it is, tries to swallow, can't swallow, tries to cough it up, reeling it's not a shrimp. And then it goes into its naval cavity instead of coming in its nose and it gets stuck. Now the odds of this happening are probably, you know, it's not very low, it's probably quite high, but it still happened twice within a span of four months. So that you can almost assume that it can happen more, probably more studies need to be known, we need to be done to be able to say that specifically, but, or with any kind of reassurance, but this obviously happened twice, so we know that it can happen once. So during this clip, you know, he talks, you know, interestingly talks about how it doesn't really add up, how they're saying, hey, like he said, I've only seen six sea turtles in my entire lifetime. I've never seen one with this drop, it's nose. I haven't seen one. So why would I believe you when it says that this is a big problem, right? Never talking about how these sea turtles are endangered and all the different things that are facing it, climate change, you know, the fact that they get poached quite a bit, like their eggs get poached quite a bit, sea turtles get killed quite a bit for food and for tourists, sort of trinkets and things like that, they don't talk about the fact that from hatchling to adult, the odds of getting is like, you know, two to 450 eggs or, you know, that make it to adulthood, there's a lot going against the sea turtle. It's slow growing, so any kind of big movement or big pressure against it could really wipe out a whole generation or a whole nest in one. We just don't know, right? So I understand this is a comedy routine. I totally understand that. And I totally understand how it's like, hey, you know what, you know, it's, I don't see it, so why would I believe it? And again, this is the problem here that perpetuates the message that if we don't see it for ourselves, then why would we believe it? We believe whales get stranded 'cause we see whales get stranded, but we don't always see a straw and a sea turtle's nose. We don't always see a fork and a sea turtle's nasal cavity. But they get there. We've actually seen that on video. It actually gets there. So we could be, it's almost safe to assume that it happens more often than we think. We talk about how there are hundreds of thousands of animals that get killed from plastic, but does that mean like when scientists come out and say those numbers that people aren't believing it because comedians say, hey, if I don't see it with my own eyes, I don't believe it, right? He even goes into a little bit of a kind of like a, a skit where he talks about like ocean, big currents there and you know, he talks about like kind of like in a very Neanderthal kind of voice and be like, it just doesn't add up. The ocean's such a big place. How can it be so damaged? But again, that's the problem. It is damaged. Microplastics are all over the ocean from top to bottom. And if you see the research that's out there, you understand that that is always going to be a problem the way that we manage and the way that we use single use plastics. But here's what I'm worried about. When you see a comedian like this joke about it, is that mean that it becomes like people believe that? Like people are be like, oh man, if somebody talks about this, how could they even talk about? How could they even think that this is a problem? You know, like Andrew says he was right. Like this is a, he is a comedian, right? And a good one at that. It was a funny skit. Like if you take it for what it's worth, like for what it is, it's a little bit that he did and it's funny, I get it. But my concern is that people put so much into comedians. We listen to comedians on podcasts. We see them on videos. We watch them in specials and we see more and more of these specials coming out. And they comment on, you know, big issues and small issues and environmental issues. And if we can, if they continue to comment for that bit to be like, hey, you know what? Like this is, this could be a problem. I worry that the message gets manipulated. And people are just like, you know, sea turtles are not being affected by plastic straws. Why do we have to worry about a plastic straw? And I've heard this before. This is why I get worried about this. When Clubhouse was a thing, that Clubhouse that was an app that you can get on and you can hold rooms and you can have a chat about a specific topic. There was a movie that came out that I'm not even gonna name. It was an Netflix movie that had a lot of misinformation in it and it was supposed to get people to also name it, sea spearsee. It was a terrible documentary. It was a lot of misinformation, but they wanted to get people to stop eating fish. And so I held a Clubhouse, I guess, a talk on that discussion about why I didn't like a lot of the messaging that came out of sea spearsee. And people were coming in and attacking me for this. And I'm like, look, the problem is it wasn't right. Like if you want people to stop eating fish, that's fine. You can do that, but don't talk about misinformation just like people are trying to misinform people about climate change that I talked about on Monday's episode. Like don't get into all of that. Tell the truth, like science is science. That's the way it is. If you wanna be an advocate, be an advocate and tell people to stop eating fish. There are a lot of reasons why many people can stop eating fish. However, most of the people in the world depend on fish, like as they're protein source. So you'll never really get rid of it. That was the kind of topic that I was talking about. And then people, somehow the conversation got misaligned and people were talking about, yeah, plastic straws. I don't wanna talk about plastic straws anymore. Why do we need to worry about plastic straws? That's, there's the messaging that's a big problem. Plastic straw is like a gateway plastic to the rest of the single use plastic problem, right? And so having plastic straws, knowing that it affects sea turtles, having a video that it affects sea turtles, right? Maybe we don't have the scientific study that shows that it affects sea turtles on a wider range. But we could assume that plastic kills sea turtles in one way or another, whether it be a straw in its nose or a plastic fork in its nose, or just the fact that it accumulates plastic over time in microplastics. There is a reason, there's significant evidence out there to show that plastics affect a lot of species, not only sea turtles, but marine mammals and fish, sharks, sea birds and so forth, that will kill hundreds of thousands of animals in the ocean a year. So sea turtles are part of that. But when you have people like, I am sick of hearing about the plastic straw, why are you sick of hearing it? Is it, you just sick of hearing it because you see it everywhere and you want a plastic straw? Or is it because you want to just, you're just done with it? You're just sick of that feeling because it's inconvenience to you or you're just sick of that talk? Maybe dive deeper, maybe as communicators, we need to dive deeper into it and start talking about how it is a gateway plastic, like a gateway drug, right? And that is a symbol of a larger problem of single-use plastics, right? And that's really where it comes down to. But my worry in this episode that I want to talk about is just kind of nail at home one more time, is that comedians hold a lot of power in today's information highway. If you look at a show like The Daily Show with John Stuart and other comedians now, it started off with John Stuart, he covers the news and people rely a lot of times on him talking about the news, that's where they get their news from. But it is a comedy show, he's even said it himself. He goes, I am a comedian giving you information and trying to highlight the hypocrisy of the different news channels out there. But he has his own opinion and he has his own thoughts and he identifies, and a lot of the comedians that are with him on that team of Comedy Central identify a lot of the hypocrisy, a lot of the misinformation, a lot of the manipulation in the media, according to politics, especially when it comes to politics. And a lot of other shows, John Oliver's Show, we had the Colbert Show or Colbert Report back in the day, all those are comedy shows. They're there to highlight the comedic value but also inform people of some of the stuff that goes on in media as well as politics. And people are well aware now on both sides of whatever part of the aisle you're from in politics, you understand that there are biases in the media and that definitely highlights it from shows like The Daily Show. But the problem is it is a comedy show. And a lot of the times when John Stuart has been debating other journalists, or so-called journalists, editorial journalists, who also manipulate the message that he makes fun of, he will say, he's like, look, he's like, people will depend on you for the news. He's like, they shouldn't be depending on me for the news. I am a comedian. I am not the news. My show is satire. But over time, that has evolved into highlighting a lot of really interesting information that people don't know because they're not put in regular media, regular news programs or editorial programs. John Oliver's show is really good at highlighting things. He did a really great piece on Deepsea Mining that really highlighted information and a lot of the hypocrisy that goes around with certain countries vying for a spot and starting to mine or discover whether they can mine for Deepsea, like Deepsea Mining sort of metals, right? Even though they know that it's a risk. And it was a great piece. And John Oliver comes up with these pieces every single one and every single show. So it's interesting to see how that develops. But again, the problem is it is a comedy show. So sometimes they say some ridiculous things. And depending on where you fit on that issue, you may like it or you may not like the stuff that he puts out 'cause it is biased. And the same thing goes back to this, to go back to this Andrew Santino and the sea turtle and the plastics that were doesn't add up. That's like he equates, and this is, I know this is comedy. So remember that, and I'm not nearly as good as a comedian as Andrew Santino, but he equates a plastic straw ending up in a sea turtle's nose as throwing a Q-tip up in the air and catching it and getting inside of his penis. Obviously for a comedic bit. But we know how the straw got into the sea turtle. The sea turtle tried to eat it. It doesn't know the difference. And Oliver Lee's sea turtle is experimental in terms of what they try and bite on because they think it's a shrimp or they think it's a crab or they think it's something floating in the water that could look like food. Unfortunately, it's not, it wasn't. And it severely hurt that sea turtle would eventually probably have killed the sea turtle if it wasn't for Chris Figner and her team with Dr. Nathan Johnson and Dr. Chris Figner and to see that they were there to rescue it. That doesn't always happen. So we don't know how many sea turtles have died because of plastic straws or plastic force or any kind of plastic that they've ingested because they've tried to eat it, right? And this is what I'm worried about. So you know how I feel about this position. I want to know how you feel about this position. Love to hear your thoughts on what you think of plastic straws as a symbol of the larger issue of plastic pollution. Let me know in the comments on Spotify, in the comments on our YouTube, if you're watching this on YouTube. And of course, if you want to hit me up on a DM, on Instagram, @HowToProtectTheOcean, I'd love to hear from you. So that's @HowToProtectTheOcean. Until next time, I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The How To Protect The Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time. And happy conservation. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
