Over three million dead fish wash up in Mexico’s Lake Cajititlán

Over 82 tonnes of dead freshwater fish have been hauled from Lake Cajititlán this week.

“The water used to be blue and crystal clear. You could see the sand and the fish beneath the surface,” said Dolores Herrera, a middle-aged fisherman’s wife from Cajititlán, a lakeside village in western Mexico. “The entire town used to bathe in the lake. Now I wouldn’t dare dip my feet in it.”

Over 82 tonnes of dead popoche chub fish have been hauled out of Lake Cajititlán since Sunday, when the now grey-green surface was covered in floating bodies for about as far as the eye could see.

The sudden death of approximately 3.2 million freshwater fish remains an unsolved mystery, but this is only the latest in a string of ecological disasters to hit Mexico in recent weeks.

It came just days after illegal drilling in the eastern state of Veracruz led 4,000 gallons of crude oil to leak into a nearby river, turning the water red and killing hundreds of turtles, rabbits, mice, birds and fish.

Earlier in August, Mexico suffered another environmental catastrophe when over 10 million gallons of toxic waste from a copper mine spilled into two rivers in the northern state of Sonora, leaving 24,000 people without clean water…

Click here to read this story in full over at The Independent.