THREE GRAY WHALES BEACHED IN NORTHWEST MEXICO

(Reuters) Three adult gray whales have washed up dead at the Magdalena Bay breeding lagoon in northwestern Mexico, television news said Thursday. Televisa showed footage of biologists at the port of San Carlos in the southern reaches of the Magdalena lagoon preparing the corpses for post-mortem examinations. It was not known what caused the deaths, nor whether any pregnant females were among the dead. Magdalena Bay is one of three major lagoons traditionally used by gray whales for breeding in Mexico's northwestern Baja California Sur state.

Two other whales were discovered dead on the coast of Mexico's western Sinaloa state earlier this year, Televisa said. Biologists are concerned that too many whales are being found beached in shallow waters or dying during the crucial breeding period of their life cycle. "This is not normal," said Homero Aridjis, poet and president of the Group of 100, a leading environmental organization in Mexico. "In general, you don't see them dead, and this implies something is disturbing them, possibly climate change or changes in water temperature or pollution in their waters," he said.

Each year the majority of the world's remaining gray whale population migrates from Arctic seas to a handful of warm water lagoons on Mexico's Baja California peninsula to breed and give birth. The whales arrived late in Mexico this year, their departure from the northern Bering Sea, between Alaska and Siberia, delayed possibly by climactic factors, ecologists say. Cases of beaching or outright deaths have been reported in Sonora, Baja California and Nayarit states, all in Mexico's west, he added.

"Each week we hear of more beachings or deaths, and they are traveling very far south - something is disturbing them in their migratory route, in their patterns," Aridjis said. "We are very concerned, and there has been no investigation of the reasons." Only a handful of the barnacle-encrusted gray whales had arrived in December, when normally hundreds are found in Mexico's warm water lagoons. Most arrived during January instead.

SOURCE: Excerpted from the 20 February, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition. Reprinted for the public interest.

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