The hermit crab forced to live in a toothpaste cap

It's a heartbreaking scene which reveals the harsh reality of plastic pollution and what it’s doing to Earth's sea creatures.

According to recent estimates, the ocean is filled with eight million tonnes of garbage - enough to fill five carrier bags for every foot of coastline on the planet.

The image was uploaded by Reddit user Hscmidt after his girlfriend spotted the tiny crab roaming a beach in Cuba.

Hermit crabs use second-hand shells for shelter and to give their soft bodies extra protection from predators. 

The crabs frequently need to find new homes, usually in the form of other shells, as they grow larger.

‘At first I thought this was cute, but then I realise what it actually means,’ one Reddit user wrote about the image.

‘It's come to the point on Earth where humans have created so much waste, that nature has now started to incorporate it into its everyday cycle of life.’ 

Around 8 million tons of plastic bottles, bags, toys and other plastic rubbish ends up in the world’s oceans each year. 

Because of the difficulties in working out the exact amount, since much of it may have sunk, scientists say the true figure could be as much as 12.7 million tons polluting the ocean each year. 

Carried by sea currents, this waste congregates into five giant ‘garbage islands’ that swirl around the world’s major ocean gyres.

Last month, Nasa created a visualisation of this pollution highlighting the extend to which humanity is ruining the oceans with waste.

Dr Jenna Jambeck, from the University of Georgia in the US, said we are becoming ‘overwhelmed by our waste’.

The team also warned that this ‘ocean of plastic’ can harm sea life.

Turtles can mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them. The bags then block their stomachs, which causes them to starve to death.

Last year, a horrific picture of an albatross chick, dead on a beach in the north Pacific, highlighted the scale of the global problem.

Scientists believe the dozens of discarded bottle tops, fishing nets and splintered plastic in its stomach were fed to the bird by its parents.

Between 2010 and 2025, some 155million tons of plastic could be dumped into the ocean – enough to fill 100 bags per foot of coastline.

Piled one on top of the other, the bags would create a wall of rubbish 100ft high.

China tops the league of plastic polluters, accounting for up to 3.5million tons a year, or almost a quarter of the total, the American Association for Advancement of Science’s annual conference in San Jose, California, heard last year 

Co-author Roland Geyer, associate professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said: 

‘Large-scale removal of plastic marine debris is not going to be cost-effective and quite likely simply unfeasible.

‘This means we need to prevent plastic from entering the oceans in the first place through better waste management, more reuse and recycling, better product design and material substitution.’

(dailymail.co.uk)