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Concerns about bird flu mostly focus on infected livestock and humans, but it's also reached marine mammals in some of the world's most remote areas. NPR's Nate Rott reports.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Marine ecologist Connor Bamford knew something was off soon after arriving on South Georgia, a subantarctic island deep in the South Atlantic Ocean in 2024.
CONNOR BAMFORD: The beaches, which were normally full...
ROTT: So crowded with elephant seals that...
BAMFORD: You'd struggle to walk from the waterline up to behind where the harems are. There were big gaps in between them, and you could just walk through them quite easily.
ROTT: Bamford, who works with the British Antarctic Survey, knew the avian flu had been present on the island since 2023, likely spread there by migrating birds. He knew it had been killing elephant seals, and he knew that aerial surveys of some of the island's beaches had been taken before the virus was present. So he did them again.
BAMFORD: It was exactly the same drone and flew the exact same path.
ROTT: From above, Bamford says, it's easy to tell the difference between male and female elephant seals.
BAMFORD: The males are absolutely colossal.
ROTT: Weighing as much as a dump truck. Females are smaller. So when they compared those new photos to the old...
BAMFORD: The numbers are pretty stark when we processed it all. We expected that there was going to be a drop but not this level of drop.
ROTT: The results of Bamford's new survey, published in the journal Communications Biology, found that the number of breeding females on the island had declined by almost half since the arrival of the avian flu.
MARCELA UHART: The massive marine mammal mortality has only happened in the Southern Hemisphere.
ROTT: Marcela Uhart is a wildlife veterinarian with the University of California, Davis, based in Argentina who is not part of this study. And she says unlike mammals in the Northern Hemisphere, where the avian flu has been circulating for decades, in the Southern Hemisphere...
UHART: These species have never been exposed to this virus before.
ROTT: Making them so vulnerable. She's hopeful that most species will be able to recover. But to help them, she says we people need to minimize external factors, like overfishing and climate change, to give them a chance.
Nate Rott, NPR News.
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