More than 200 dead dolphins have been found washed-up along the western coast of France.

Many of the animals had deep wounds on their beaks and flippers - some even had parts of their bodies sliced off.

Alexandre Dewez, of the Sea Life Study Group at Capbreton, said the remains of 90 dolphins were found on Thursday alone in the Landes department, near the border with Spain.

"The wounds are characteristic of the damage caused to sea mammals by fishing trawlers," he said.

"The dolphins follow schools of mackerel, anchovy or sardine, and find themselves caught in the mesh."

The dolphins' bodies have been coming ashore since the beginning of the week.

The cause of their deaths cannot be firmly established until the corpses have undergone a detailed examination.

But experts believe selective trawling techniques are almost certainly to blame.

The dolphin deaths are bound to spark a debate about industrial fishing techniques.

The use of drift-nets has been widely criticised for indiscriminately killing huge numbers of fish and dolphins.

It is being phased out in the European Union and will be banned completely by the end of 2001.

Intensive fishing

But fishermen are using large-scale trawl-nets, which can be almost as devastating to fish stocks.

Frederick Claveau, oceans specialist at Greenpeace France, said: "This is part of a larger problem caused by the failure to develop more selective techniques of fishing."

Experts believe the dead dolphins are only one aspect of the much wider problem of intensive fishing in the Bay of Biscay.

Fisherman now almost exclusively use so-called "pelagic" trawlers, drawing nets that can be as large as 400 by 900 metres.

"It's not just the dolphins. Many types of fish are endangered by this indiscriminate method of fishing, which often ends up discarding 80 percent of the fish that are caught," Anne Collett, of the Sea Mammal Research Centre at La Rochelle, said.

Fishermen anger

But French fisherman have reacted angrily to the suggestion they are to blame for the dolphin deaths.

"Of course it can happen," Joseph Blanchot, of the regional fishing committee of Aquitaine, said.

"A trawler can pick up one or two dolphins - that's inevitable. But on this scale - never," he said. "Once again we are the scapegoats, and we have a campaign to blacken our names."

Experts say that, over the past decade, dolphins have been washed up in France annually in February.

In 1997, 900 dolphins were found dead.

But the dolphins that reach the coast are only a small percentage of the numbers that have died.

"Most of the animals sink over time and do not reach the beaches," Anne Collet said.