In 1992, a shipment of Friendly Floatee bath toys—yellow duckies, red beavers, green froggies, and blue turtles—left the port of Hong Kong for Tacoma, Washington. When the ship hit a storm, a container with 28,800 of the toys was washed overboard and opened! Most tub toys have a small air hole that would eventually have filled with water and sunk the toy—but not Friendly Floatees! They keep right on floating! And they have provided a rare opportunity for scientists to track the changing patterns of ocean currents that are an important indication of global warming.
The world's oceans and seas are able to retain heat and move it around from one continent to another, and this has far-reaching implications for the study of climate change and weather conditions—for instance, whether winters will be severe or mild for the coming twenty or thirty years in various parts of the world—among other important factors in the search for ways to predict and cope with global warming!
When oceanographers track sea currents, they usually release between fifty and one hundred "drift" bottles to help them trace currents, with a recovery rate of only 2%—only ten or twenty bottles from each release are ever found and tracked. So oceanographers were excited at the amount of information about ocean currents they were likely to get from such a big and distinctive shipment.
The ducks washed ashore all over the world, and while some took a very long time to make land, a number of them traveled full circle around the North Pacific in just three years, twice as fast as the surface water itself, so the oceanographers started calling them "hyper-ducks." These now-famous ducks—and their fellow travelers, the beavers, froggies, and turtles—have been the subject of two children's books and have become collectors' items, with avid collectors spending as much as $1,000 per tub toy!
