More than 400 dead dolphins found on Pacific Ocean beaches

More than 400 dead dolphins were found last month on the Pacific Ocean beaches of northern Peru, where twice that number were found in 2012, according to officials.

Authorities never established the cause of the deaths in 2012 and are now carrying out autopsies on the dolphins found last month in the Lambayeque region on the northern coast.

Yuri Hooker, the director of Marine Biology at the University of Cayetano Herida, said the cause of such a large number of dolphin deaths was, as yet, unknown.

"This year there has been some evidence of interaction with the fish, that's to say dolphins that have fallen into fishing nets and have died as a result, but it's difficult to imagine that 400 or more dolphins have died because of this," he said.

Hooker added that in other parts of the world, dolphin deaths were usually caused by environmental contamination when the sea mammals eat fish or other smaller species filled with toxins, or others die after ingesting discarded plastic floating in the sea.

The marine biologist also said determining the death of dolphins was "complicated" in Peru because government laboratories had only three or four of the world's 100 or so chemical reagents that can be used for determining the animals' cause of death.

Autopsies on some of the more than 870 dolphins found in 2012 were inconclusive.

Speculation ranged from biotoxins in the sea to seismic testing, to an unknown ailment.

At a news conference in Lima on Tuesday, Peru's Minister of Production and Fisheries, Gladis Triveno, said that some of the dead dolphins showed clear signs of having died due to interaction with humans.

"For example, that they (dolphins) had got wrapped up in a fishing net. In these cases it's easy to work it out, even when there is this state of decomposition," she said.

Triveno added that for those dead dolphins that didn't show these signs the investigation was much more complex.

An official from Peru's IMARPE marine life agency said that autopsy results were expected in two weeks, with examinations focusing on lungs, kidneys and livers.


AP