{"id":503203,"date":"2026-02-27T14:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T14:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/503203\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T14:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T14:29:08","slug":"bird-flu-kills-dozens-of-elephant-seal-pups-at-california-state-park-us-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/503203\/","title":{"rendered":"Bird flu kills dozens of elephant seal pups at California state park | US news"},"content":{"rendered":"

An outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu<\/a> has killed more than two dozen elephant seal pups in California<\/a>, leading to the temporary closure of seal-viewing areas at a popular Bay Area park.<\/p>\n

California\u2019s A\u00f1o Nuevo state park is home to an elephant seal colony with about 5,000 seals during the marine mammals\u2019 breeding season, which runs from mid-December through March. Researchers said about 30 seals had died as of Thursday, nearly all of them weaned pups, amid the rise of avian influenza.<\/p>\n

A team of researchers from the University of California at Davis and UC Santa Cruz has intensified its monitoring efforts since detecting the outbreak last week, which marks the first cases of HPAI H5N1 in marine mammals in California. This strain was catastrophic farther south, in Argentina, where the outbreak led to a 70% mortality rate among pups born during the 2023 breeding season.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur team has been so dedicated working around the clock, over time, whatever it takes to continue monitoring this outbreak,\u201d Roxanne Beltran, a professor and leader of UC Santa Cruz\u2019s northern elephant seal research program at A\u00f1o Nuevo, told the Guardian. \u201cIt\u2019s a really hard, emotional thing to go through as undergraduate, graduate students and young scientists to watch the seals that you\u2019ve gotten to know over the years get sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beltran noted that, as of Thursday, deaths had remained at a steady, relatively low number rather than increasing exponentially.<\/p>\n

The elephant seal colony at A\u00f1o Nuevo state park is one of the most intensively studied in the world, according to Beltran. For more than six decades, scientists have monitored the colony through flipper tagging and long-term tracking of individual seals\u2019 survival, reproduction and diving behavior.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve gathered more than 380,000 observations of 55,000 seals, so we know an extraordinary amount about what\u2019s typical for those seals,\u201d Beltran said.<\/p>\n

She called the outbreak \u201cunique\u201d in disease ecology research because the team appears to have detected it at a very early stage. Precisely because the population is so well-documented, with individual seals identified and tracked since birth, researchers can match infection outcomes to specific animals and better understand the outbreak\u2019s consequences.<\/p>\n

It remains unclear how the seals contracted the virus or whether it will spread beyond California.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t yet know where the seals got the virus, and we don\u2019t know if, for example, they got it from birds, if the birds move in a way that could transmit the virus outside of California,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It also remains uncertain why weaned pups seem more susceptible to contracting the strain.<\/p>\n

Researchers are also working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries, the California department of fish and wildlife and the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network to monitor marine mammals on the coast.<\/p>\n

A\u00f1o Nuevo state park is currently open with restrictions, according to its website. Cancellations for the seal-viewing tours, which are mandatory during the seals\u2019 breeding season, have been issued through the end of March, according to Adeline Yee, a spokesperson for California state parks.<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of an abundance of caution, access is being paused to give wildlife space and allow for ongoing monitoring,\u201d reads a notification on the state park\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The park receives more than 60,000 visitors each year.<\/p>\n

More than 400 tours have been cancelled, including 1,547 reservations and 4,363 tickets. More than 50 school tours have been cancelled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu has killed more than two dozen elephant seal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-503203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}