On December 1997, 94 corpses of green turtles,
Chelonia mydas, were found at the Ojo de Liebre lagoon (OLL) adjacent to the industrial operation of Exportadora de Sal S. A (ESSA), the largest saltworks in the world, owned by the Mexican Government and Mitsubishi Corporation, located in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Every year about 551 × 10
6 m
3 of seawater is solar evaporated, producing 7 × 10
6 tons of salt and 24.6 × 10
6 m
3 of bitterns, the latter being discharged into the OLL, which is a costal lagoon of the Pacific Ocean. ESSA claimed that bitterns contain the same salts present in seawater, but 20-fold more concentrated than the former. Ion chromatography with a conductivity detector and ion suppression was used to determine the F
-, Cl
-, SO
42- and CO
32- contents of seawater, brines and bitterns collected at ESSA. Furthermore, the osmolality of brines and bitterns from ESSA was measured. F
- content in bitterns was 60.5-fold more than that in seawater. The bitterns osmolality was 11000 mosm/kg of water, whereas the turtle’s plasma osmolality was about 400 mosm/kg of water. We concluded that the dumping of bitterns into the ocean should be avoided.
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