A team of researchers have said that they have been able to successfully remove a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose, in an instance that highlights the impact of seas pollution on wild life.

A researcher recently posted a video on YouTube showing colleagues removing plastic drinking straw from the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. The video shows a straw in the turtle’s left nostril, flush with the skin. The researcher struggles to dislodge the object and the turtle snorts and bleeds.

The researcher believed that it was a parasitic worm, but then they remove off the small piece they found that it was plastic. They pulled out a piece from turtle’s nose and cut it open witha Swiss army knife. The researcher says in Spanish, “Esplástico”and realise that it was a piece of plastic straw. They took eight minutes to pull the straw out as it was a full-length drinking straw.

Christine Figgener, a second year marine biology PhD student at Texas A&M University recorded the video of colleague, Nathan J. Robinson, a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana-Purdue University.