They are now calling on Islanders to stop using so much plastic.
The children from Year 4 at Mont Nicolle School contacted the JEP to get the message out to a wider audience and sent in articles they had written as part of a literacy project.
In a letter to the editor signed by the class, they wrote: ‘For our unaided writing task we watched a clip from the Blue Planet series which showed a whale calf killed due to micro plastics in the ocean. We would like to tell the people of Jersey not to put plastic in the sea and to try to reduce the amount of plastic they use.’
The children have also decided to organise a beach clean in the spring and some have been trying a no-plastic fortnight at home.
Their teacher Katie Hargreaves said: ‘I showed them the clip and they did some amazing writing. They also wanted to see if they could do something about the issue.’
Naturalist David Attenborough, who presents the Blue Planet series, has said that rising global temperatures and plastic were the biggest concerns for the ocean. He told The Guardian newspaper: ‘What we’re going to do about 1.5 degrees rise in the temperature of the ocean over the next ten years, I don’t know, but we could actually do something about plastic right now.’
Referring to the filming of the series, he added: ‘There are so many sequences that every single one of us have been involved in – even in the most peripheral way – where we have seen tragedies happen because of the plastic in the ocean.
‘We’ve seen albatrosses come back with their belly full of food for their young and nothing in it. The albatross parent has been away for three weeks gathering stuff for her young and what comes out? What does she give her chick? You think it’s going to be squid, but it’s plastic. The chick is going to starve and die.
‘There are more examples of that. But we could do things about plastic internationally tomorrow.’
