We interrupt your day to bring you a haunting image of the mouth of a sea turtle.

Yes, the picture looks like something straight out of Jaws but it is, in fact, the interior of the mouth of a turtle, a normally sweet and majestic creature.

The spikes are not vicious fangs to terrorise their prey and rip them to shreds, they’re actually to stop them from releasing all their food.

In fact, they’re not even teeth. The spikes, found in turtle species like leatherbacks, loggerheads, and green sea turtles, are called papillae.

Artist and biologist Helen Kairo, who runs the Anatomika Science Instagram account and website, drew some illustrations to explain why they have them.

She explains that they are anti-vomiting spikes.

‘Sea turtles swallow a lot of seawater while eating. As they eat, their stomach fills up with food and seawater.

‘They then vomit out all the water. The spikes trap food and keep it from coming out. It’s basically a reverse filter’.

But plastic ocean pollution is having a dangerous effect on these creatures, adds Helen.

The natural spines in their mouth make it much harder for them when they ingest plastic as it often gets stuck.

‘This is why they have such a problem with plastic bags,’ she writes on Instagram. ‘It’s because the unique structure of their oesophagus makes it so that they can’t get rid of them.’

In other images she created, Helen shows other animals who have similar methods of expelling excess water.

Fish for example, push out water from their gills and only swallow food.

Whales use baleen – fringed plates hanging in their mouth that are used to strain seawater for food.

Helen comments that these methods have worked pretty well, until now.

That’s because the plastic gets trapped inside them and is unable to be pushed out as a result of the papillae, meaning they’re stuck there.

These creatures then end up with the toxic chemicals in their guts.

Which is why we need to be mindful of the problem with plastic as it can take as long as 600 years to biodegrade.

Currently, there are five trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. A plastic bag was found 36,000 feet below the surface, at the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench.

That’s worrying for sea life, birds, animals, and humans.

Source: Read Full Article