Just Ducky

The 5 am Ch 5 ABC News (7/24/06) are reporting More Portuguese Man-o-war on Cape Cod.
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A 12 year-old boy was stung in Harwich on the outer Cape this past week-end.
Paramedics used baking soda to draw out the poison, like they do with bee stings. Over a dozen people were reported stung here this summer so far.
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Rhode Island Beaches, on the Atlantic coast (less than an hour South of here) are also reporting more of the floating poisonous menace, n a "waist-high" swimming alert is in effect there.
Rip current warnings still in effect with swells still up all over the Cape.
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Talkin about critters riding the Tropical Atlantic Ocean currents...
On World News Now, ABC's fun early am news report, They have this Brittish dude, Declin Curry, give odd stories in the news from across the pond. Thousands of little Plastic toy ducks are now swimmin along the Gulf stream, currently on their way to visit the Brittish Isles.

The container of bath toys, which later broke open, took a stormy weather leap off a vessel from China in the Pacific Ocean (along with a container of Nike shoes) way back in the early 1990's. Scientists have turned the spill into an Ocean currents science project.
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I find the subject pretty interesting. I took a full year of Earth n Ocean Science courses in college. (n Astronomy, too)
It's no secret all the Earth's oceans (besides the land-locked Dead Sea) are connected n an object (or a creature) caught in a major current can travel through both major oceans over time if they hit it right.
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So I searched and found the story source: "Pacific Toy Spill Fuels Ocean Current Research"
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The following is excerpted from the site:
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/ducks.html
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Source: Eos, Vol. 75, p.425, September 13, 1994.
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"...At 44.7°N, 178.1°E, a dozen forty-foot (13.3 m) containers were washed overboard, one of which held about 29,000 plastic bathtub toys ...
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... Ten months after the spill, plastic toys began washing up on beaches near Sitka, Alaska...
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The 6- to 12-cm toys manufactured in China were packaged in a plastic housing glued to a cardboard backing.
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... we learned that approximately 400 toys, positively identified from photographs, were found between November 1992 and August 1993, along approximately 850 km of shore between the city of Cordova and Coronation Island, bordering the eastern Gulf of Alaska..."
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"... several bottles released in the vicinity of Nome, Alaska, were found approximately 10 years later in Iceland, Ireland, and Norway; and a drift bottle, released June 26, 1979, in the Bering Strait was found in western Scotland 7 years later on July 6, 1986..."
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"... after a number of years we also expect some of the toys to be dispersed around the North Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, and the northern North Atlantic Ocean...
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... Given the substantial release of 29,000 toy animals, we anticipate that by the year 2000 a few toys will have been transported to many oceanic locations in the Northern Hemisphere.
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... We ask your help in reporting any subsequent finds of the toys or other interesting drifting objects. ..."
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Well, here we are in '06!
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Tropical critters like Portugeuse Man-o-War, Basking sharks, Sea-turtles, n alligators have been showing up by the droves far from home in Massachusetts n on the Cape this season.
I hope they decide to go home when vaca is over...
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n if ya see any wayward yellow, plasic duckies, send the project a postcard!