The bird flu outbreak last year on Península Valdés in Argentina, killed over 17,000 elephant seals, including almost 97% of the pups. It has also left a scar on this vulnerable population of animals, with only about a third of the seals typically expected here returning.
The unprecedented outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza that swept through elephant seal breeding grounds last year left the beaches quieter, and the normally bustling colonies have drastically diminished.
“It’s beautiful to walk the beaches now and hear elephant seals again,” said Marcela Uhart, director of the Latin America Program at the UC Davis Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center. “At the same time, we’re walking among piles of carcasses and bones, and seeing very few elephant seal harems, so it’s still disturbing.”
A study published in Nature Communications, co-led by scientists from UC Davis and Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), sheds light on how H5N1 spread among marine mammals during the 2023 outbreak.
The United Nations starting warning of a human bird flu risk in 2023 also.
United Nations Warns Of Human Bird Flu Risk
“We’re showing the evolution of H5N1 viruses that belong to genotype B3.2 over time since their introduction in South America in late 2022,” said co-lead author Agustina Rimondi, a scientist at INTA and the Robert Koch Institute. “This virus is capable of adapting to marine mammal species, as we can see from the mutations that are consistently found in the viruses belonging to this clade,” they added according to a report by Earth.
“It is likely that more than half of the reproductive population died due to the virus. It will take decades before the numbers are back to the 2022 population size,” said WCS Argentina director of coastal and marine conservation Valeria Falabella.
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