MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Dead penguins found on Argentina beaches

About 100 oil-coated Magellanic penguins have turned up dead in the past two weeks in a nature reserve near the frigid southernmost tip of Argentina, local reports said Thursday.

Some 300 other penguins survived and are being treated and cleaned before being released.

Authorities said they were searching for a source of the pollution after no crude-oil spills were reported in the area on the Straits of Magellan.

"This is very worrisome. We don't the source of this," said Francisco Anglesio, environmental undersecretary for Santa Cruz province where the penguin deaths occurred. His comments were carried by leading daily La Nacion in Thursday's editions.

Anglesio said the dead penguins were found at the Cabo Virgenes nature reserve on the Straits of Magellan in Santa Cruz province, 2,400 kilometers (1,350 miles) south of Buenos Aires.

The first dead penguins were discovered in late April and conservationists have begun daily patrols among nesting areas, said another leading newspaper, Clarin. It said workers had set up a cleaning and care center for surviving birds in Rio Gallegos, the provincial capital closest to the reserve.

"We have asked businesses that operate in the area to carry out ... tests to determine if it's possible that some of their pipes have a leak," Anglesio said of companies in the Patagonian region.

Those leading the recovery work said the carcasses of the dead penguins were covered up to 70 percent in oil, but about' 40 others were found alive and were expected to survive a difficult cleaning process to remove the black goo.

Some 1.8 million breeding pairs of the penguins are estimated to live in nesting areas in southernmost South America and the Falkland Islands, a neighboring South Atlantic archipelago. They nest in burrows and feed offshore on fish both on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

Oil spills are reported by environmentalists to have caused thousands of penguin deaths over the years. The dumped oil can cause respiratory problems and destroys the insulating properties of penguin feathers, leading to the rapid loss of body temperature.

To stay warm, the birds head toward shore, where they can eventually die from starvation.

The last reported oil spill along the Strait occurred last September, killing some 40 penguins.