Short Stuff: Friendly Floatees

In 1992 more than 28,000 rubber ducks got loose in the ocean and began a decades-long experiment in oceanography.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck Ahoy maydie. This is short stuff. It's a
fun story. Yeah. Have you you've heard of this before? Right?
I have? And I mean it's about as fun as
an ecological disaster can get. I guess, well said, well said,
And we are talking about an ecological disaster UM, and

(00:24):
it's one that happens kind of frequently, which is UM
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

(00:47):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:53):
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.

(02:17):
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.

(02:38):
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

(03:00):
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,

(03:26):
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

(03:48):
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.

(04:08):
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

(04:30):
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

(04:52):
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.

(05:23):
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

(05:44):
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

(06:06):
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

(06:29):
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

(06:51):
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

(07:13):
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,

(07:33):
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,

(07:54):
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,

(08:16):
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

(08:38):
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,

(09:03):
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,

(09:26):
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.

(09:48):
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

(10:08):
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.

(10:30):
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