SCIENCE : Scientists Sound Duck Call for ‘Quack Heard ‘Round World’
In the frigid, stormy waters of the Gulf of Alaska, amid the killer whales and sea lions and king salmon, researchers have discovered a new species of Pacific wildlife that is yielding mounds of scientific data about the marine environment.
Rubber duckies.
Molded plastic duckies, actually. Thousands of them. And not just ducks--frogs, turtles and beavers too.
For almost three years, an armada of 29,000 plastic bathtub toys has been slogging around the North Pacific, pushed by ocean currents and breezes after falling from a cargo ship.
The toys hit the water when the ship, traveling from China to Tacoma, Wash., hit stormy seas south of the Aleutian Islands and a 40-foot-long metal container plunged overboard. Ten months later, heaps of yellow ducks, green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers began washing up on the cobble beaches around Sitka, Alaska.
Since then, hundreds of the palm-sized toys, some bleached nearly white by saltwater and weather, have been turning up along the Alaska coastline.
The ducky dunking has turned out to be an unexpected boon to scientists studying the ocean environment.
“We’re extremely interested in these duckies,” said Curt Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who, with partner James Ingraham Jr., has been using the toys to track currents and wind patterns. Their paper on the bathtub toys was published last year in the American Geophysical Union’s journal. The researchers think the toys can provide new data on currents that will eventually help improve methods to track spilled oil, predict weather and study salmon migrations.
The two scientists had worked together to map the movement of 80,000 Nike sneakers washed overboard in a 1990 storm off Alaska. Hundreds of the shoes were later found in British Columbia, and some recently began appearing in Hawaii. The two also helped track hundreds of rice wine bottles with messages sent by Chinese political dissidents in the late 1980s that have turned up along the West Coast.
It took some sleuthing to unravel the tale of the duckies. Using a manufacturer’s label on the bottom of the toys, the newspaper in Sitka traced the ducks to a Boston toy company, Kiddie Products Inc.
“I feel badly about these things washing up on your shores,” said David Zatcic, marketing manager of the company. “But they’re nontoxic.”
The researchers heard about the toys and issued a plea for ducky sightings, including running an ad in a newsletter for lighthouse keepers. They slowly began accumulating a record of where the ducks were turning up.
The toys quickly became collector’s items in Alaska, finding homes in hot tubs and creek races and as hood ornaments for fishing boats and sea kayaks.
It took six months, but the scientists finally persuaded the shipping company to give them the exact location and details of the accident.
With that information, they were able to develop a computer simulation to track the currents. The toys seemed to have drifted in a huge counterclockwise loop up the Alaska coast, then split up. Some have drifted south toward the Lower 48 states. A lone, weathered ducky was recently found off Washington. Some are believed headed back toward Asia.
Still others are thought to have entered the icy waters of the Bering Sea on a trajectory toward the North Pole.
Some of the ducks will hit the Arctic Ocean in a year or two, the scientists believe, eventually inching around the top of the world to the North Pacific. The researchers are planning an experiment to see how the toys weather sea ice. Based on past movements of debris, they think some toys could hit Europe by the year 2000.
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the world press. A British tabloid headline recently proclaimed: “Britain on Duck Alert.” The scientists, who are doing their toy research in their spare time, have been besieged with interview requests.
“We’ve been calling it the ‘quack heard ‘round the world,’ ” said Ingraham, an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service.
