Science: How many sea turtles has the balloon guy killed?

What’s the first thing I think about when I hear the word “cringe”? It’s the balloon guy. If you don’t know, please Google “balloon guy Instagram,” which may or may not give you the account I’m referring to. He posts pictures of balloons spelling out inspirational quotes like “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches you what you need to know,” which is a pretty bad way to think about COVID, IMO. 

So, the answer to the question we’re all wondering: how many sea turtles has the balloon guy killed? 

Methodology:

On his Instagram, he has 129 posts with balloons spelling out things. Using his nine most recent images, I’ve calculated the average number of balloons used per post to be 65.2 Balloons. 

If you multiply the number of posts (129) by the average balloons/letters per post (65.2) we’re working with about 8,413.67 balloons.

But that’s not all. He certainly has backup when making each piece. One time, I threw a masquerade themed party and bought enough balloons to spell the word “masquerade” (10 letters) and one of them popped. So that’s a 1/10 popping ratio. 

I know what you’re thinking: popped balloons don’t get to turtles. But you really think this guy doesn’t have extra balloons around that get released accidentally? Obviously, you haven’t seen his posts. I’m using the 1/10 ratio to account for float-aways, and if I’m being honest with you, I’m being nice here. There’s certainly more than 10 percent that get lost, but in the spirit of fair play, I’ll only add 10 percent more balloons, which gets us to 9,255.003 balloons. 

I bet you’re probably thinking, doesn’t he reuse the balloons? And again, I’m begging you to look at this guy and tell me he’s ever reused anything in his life. Even if he says he reuses them, I don’t trust that. Also, I’m not putting myself through the mental anguish of looking through more of his posts to find out. His bio is “A SMILE IS LIKE A HUG WITH YOUR MOUTH🙃” in special lettering that isn’t the actual Instagram lettering, so you have to imagine this guy finding a place to generate that font and taking the time to write that out and paste it exclusively in that font. I rest my case that we’re working with a minimum of 9,255.0003 balloons. He certainly has done ones that aren’t on Insta right? I don’t care to check. 

10 percent of released balloons don’t burst: they float back down and can be mistaken for food by animals. So, let’s say, he’s working with around 1,000 balloons that could end up on the beach. 1,000 of his balloons are fair game. 

Conclusion:

Now, I assume not all 1,000 of these balloons will directly reach sea turtles. 5 percent of sea turtle death is due to latex ingestion. No one would tell me how many sea turtles die annually in total, and at this point, it’s been two hours and I don’t know. I’m going to estimate that, as of now, the balloon guy is implicated in the death of 50-100 sea turtles minimum. 

Now, to the more important question: how many sea turtles does it take to kill a person? 

This article about Game of Thrones tells me that it takes about 520 pounds to crush a human skull, so let’s go with that. 

The average green sea turtle weights about 160 kg, which in pounds is 352.74 pounds. Multiply that by two and you get 705.48 pounds. Therefore, it would only take two sea turtles stacked on top of each other to crush a human skull. Don’t tell me the physics of this doesn’t work or something.