700 dolphins wash up dead during the winter along the coast of France

Some 700 dolphins washed up dead on French beaches over the winter, figures reveal, most of them, victims of the fishing industry.

Between January and April 2018, some 700 small cetenea, most of them common dolphins and to a lesser extent harbour porpoise, were found dead on beaches on the French Atlantic coast.

“Seventy to eighty percent of them presented lesions compatible with an accidental death after being caught in fishing gear,” Olivier Van Canneyt, biologist at the Observatoire Pelagis — a research centre dedicated to the conservation of marine mammals and birds — told Euronews.

Cuts from fishing nets, amputated fins, broken rostrums or asphyxiations were some of the signs that their deaths followed them being inadvertently caught by fishing vessels.

Courtesy of euronews.com

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