Dead sea turtles drifting ashore

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – More than 100 dead and dying sea turtles have washed up on the beaches of El Salvador in the past 10 days, and marine biologists cannot yet explain what is killing them.

Celina Duenas, an official with El Salvador’s Ministry of the Environment, said there are fears that the number of dead turtles could increase to 600 in the coming days.

An estimated 2,000 adult sea turtles live in the waters off El Salvador, said Dr. Carlos Drews, a sea turtle specialist with the World Wildlife Fund in Costa Rica. The outbreak could become one of the worst calamities ever to strike sea turtles in the Pacific, Drews said.

“The international conservation community is watching this and is very worried,” Drews said in a telephone interview.

A Salvadoran-American fisherman first noticed “hundreds” of dead turtles floating in the water some 40 miles off the coast of El Salvador on Dec. 30.

The first 31 carcasses found on shore washed up on a beach in the eastern Salvadoran province of La Union on Jan. 4, according to news reports. The animals weighed between 70 and 150 pounds each and had been dead at least four days, officials said.

At first, Salvadoran officials suspected the animals had been caught in fishing nets. Later, they speculated that, as in other mass deaths of sea turtles, a red tide was responsible.

Red tide caused the deaths of hundreds of turtles off the coast of Oman in 2001, Drews said. But in that case, as in other large-scale turtle deaths, many other species of sea life were also killed. In the current outbreak, only sea turtle carcasses are turning up on the beaches.

The biggest threat to sea turtles along the Mexican and Central American coasts comes from hunters that kill dozens of animals at a time for their flesh and shells. But the sea turtle carcasses found in El Salvador have all been intact. Duenas said a bacterial infection or pollution could also be behind the deaths.