Smithsonian Magazine Scientists recorded a 47 percent drop in breeding females in South Georgia’s three largest elephant seal colonies after bird flu hit. Scaled to the whole island, that’s a potential loss of more than 50,000 of the animals. In 2023, bird flu reached a remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean. Now, South Georgia—home to the world’s largest southern elephant seal population—has been transformed. Drone images of the island’s three biggest seal colonies suggest the population of breeding females has dropped by 47 percent since the introduction of the H5N1 virus in 2023. The findings, which compared the seals’ numbers in 2022 with those in 2024, were published in the journal Communications Biology on November 13.
“It painted a starker picture than I was expecting,” says lead author Connor Bamford, a marine ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey, to Emily Anthes at the New York Times.