Who would have thought the issue of the giant ship, Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal had unraveled one mystery, different from the others.
The sightings of hundreds of ducks, turtles, frogs and beavers over the past ten years are apparently the work of shipping firm Evergreen Marine Corp. which also manages the Ever Given ship.
Tracing its history, one of Evergreen’s ships-Ever Laurel has inadvertently released a total of 28, 800 plastic toys into the Pacific Ocean, including 7,200 beavers, 7,200 frogs, 7,200 turtles and 7,200 ducks.
The incident happened around the 90s and it turns out that the ‘animals’ were still scattered in the ocean for 19 years!
The advent of the plastic toy is a question mark because no one knows where it came from. Later, a journalist, Donovan Hohn made a study and explained the answer to the riddle in a book, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea in 2011.
As a result, scientific studies were conducted. Two seafarers, Jim Ingraham and Curtis Ebbesmeyer have tracked the game’s movement patterns all the way back to the North Pacific using an ocean current surface simulator.
The simulator is also the same tool used to track down 200 Nike -branded sneakers that went missing during the shipment of 80,000 shoes using a sea vessel.
Based on coordinates and shipping records, the ship Ever Laurel was found to have left Hong Kong on January 6, 1992 and arrived in Tacoma, Washington on January 16. The last sighting of the game was in 2007 in the United Kingdom (UK).
The Ever Given ship successfully floated on Monday morning this week after crossing the Suez route for a week. The incident caused Egypt to incur losses of about $ 14-15 million per day!
