{"id":537193,"date":"2026-04-18T04:50:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/537193\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T04:50:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:50:18","slug":"an-entire-colony-of-breeding-penguins-disappeared-bird-flu-is-out-of-control-now-its-reached-the-antarctic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/537193\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAn entire colony of breeding penguins disappeared.\u201d Bird flu is out of control \u2013 now it\u2019s reached the Antarctic"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 23rd October 2023, a short press release from the government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands reported that Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) \u2013 what we mostly shorten to bird flu<\/a> \u2013 had been detected on the wildlife-rich islands of South Georgia.<\/p>\n

It was the moment that this deadly form of the virus officially first arrived in the Antarctic region, completing a complex global route that has taken it from the initial outbreak in China, nearly 30 years ago, to Europe, Africa, North and South America and finally to the remote wildernesses of the Southern Ocean.<\/p>\n

Bird flu in Antarctica<\/p>\n

The roll call of its impacts in Antarctica alone makes for difficult reading. Up to half of South Georgia\u2019s breeding female southern elephant seals died between 2022 and 2024, an estimated 50,000 individuals, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global population.<\/p>\n

An entire colony of breeding gentoo penguins<\/a> in the Falkland Islands disappeared, and while the impact on Antarctic fur seals is unknown, there are large numbers of dead males and pups.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt likely arrived with brown skuas,\u201d says Connor Bamford, lead author of the research into elephant seals, published in Communications Biology.<\/p>\n

The skuas migrate all the way to the Patagonian coast to forage and brought the virus back with them after mixing with other, probably infected, birds. Bamford found that the elephant seals on South Georgia had been badly impacted in the space of just a year.<\/p>\n

Usually, he says, the female harems are so tightly clustered on the main breeding beaches it can be difficult to find any space to walk between them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we were there in 2024 doing the survey there were these huge gaps and it was just obvious that, while there were still a lot of seals, there were nowhere near as many as there should be,\u201d adds Bamford.<\/p>\n

The virus appears to thrive where wildlife lives in tightly knit colonies, which is how elephant seals (and other pinniped species) behave during the breeding season.<\/p>\n

According to Jaimie Cleeland, who is the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) science manager for King Edward Point (on South Georgia), spotting the fur and elephant seals that have contracted the virus becomes relatively easy once you know what to look for. It actually damages the alveoli in the lungs of the animals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey get these air pockets in their lungs and it\u2019s really sad,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019ll see living and dead fur and elephant seals that look strange in the water because they are really buoyant. We\u2019ve seen fur seals that are trying to dive but can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elephant seals will normally dive to depths of up to 1,000m in search of prey \u2013 squid and fish \u2013 so it is clear just what a huge impact a virus that damages the lungs and makes diving more difficult, or even impossible, will have. The animals become unable to feed.<\/p>\n

Though some mortality has been observed among the other iconic species on South Georgia, including gentoo and king penguins and wandering albatrosses, this has not been on anything like the same scale as the seals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think that the virus is probably quite pathogenic to other species, because it has killed them elsewhere, but they\u2019re not like seals \u2013 they don\u2019t breathe all over each other,\u201d says Cleeland.<\/p>\n

How did bird flu get to Antarctica?<\/p>\n

As already explained, the bird flu virus found its way to South Georgia via migrating brown skuas, who in turn picked it up after it had found its way down from North to South America. There have been some massive mortalities on that continent, including elephant seals at Pen\u00ednsula Vald\u00e9s and South American sealions on the coast of Peru.<\/p>\n

The origin of this outbreak was actually in Europe in 2020, when wild birds in the Netherlands began testing positive for HPAI, with subsequent discoveries in both wild birds and poultry across northern and eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

The origins of bird flu go back much further, since it is a natural pathogen found in wild birds, with wildfowl such as ducks, geese and swans the natural reservoir. The term \u2018fowl plague\u2019 was coined to describe bird flu in poultry in Italy and other European countries in the late 19th century.<\/p>\n

But what we now refer to as HPAI, which causes greater mortality than the natural strain, first emerged in domestic geese in China in 1996 and then jumped back into wild birds.<\/p>\n

This latest outbreak has seen much more serious impacts on wild birds than has been previously recorded. <\/p>\n

It was first observed in the UK in 2021. A massive outbreak among barnacle geese that breed in Svalbard and overwinter in the Solway Firth killed an estimated 30 per cent of the population in the winter of 2021\u201322 \u2013 more than 11,000 birds.<\/p>\n

Bird flu in the UK<\/p>\n

But, explains Susie Gold, senior conservation scientist for the RSPB, this hasn\u2019t been the catastrophe you might have expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWaterfowl have the ability to recover quickly from this kind of event \u2013 they have large clutches and produce offspring at a young age,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin a couple of years, that population was back up to where it had been before.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, the virus returned last winter, and repeated outbreaks could lead to long-term declines. For seabirds, which take longer to reproduce and have fewer young, there are much greater concerns.<\/p>\n

For example, a worrying 76 per cent of British great skuas \u2013 close relatives of the brown skuas that carried the virus to South Georgia \u2013 had been killed by the virus by 2023, reducing numbers from just over 9,000 breeding pairs to just over 2,000.<\/p>\n

The UK itself, mostly Scotland, is home to 60 per cent of all breeding great skuas, so this loss is significant for the species as a whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a species, skuas congregate in these big clubs by freshwater pools and are obviously very susceptible to the virus. That\u2019s the species we have seen take the biggest hit from a UK perspective,\u201d says Gold. Their scavenging behaviour is another key reason why they have been heavily impacted.<\/p>\n

British gannets, seabirds that breed in dense colonies, have also seen their numbers fall dramatically, with losses put at roughly a quarter nationwide.<\/p>\n

There were fears for the future of very rare species, such as roseate terns, when an outbreak hit their only UK breeding colony of Coquet Island, off the coast of Northumberland, but a good season in 2024 has raised hopes they can survive.<\/p>\n

The threat persists, conservationists say.<\/p>\n

Other seabirds, such as auks, appear to have been less badly affected. Puffins\u2019 habit of nesting in burrows may have protected them from the worst impacts, says Gold, while guillemots and razorbills seem to have escaped unscathed for reasons that aren\u2019t yet clear.<\/p>\n

Conservationists are watching one other group, birds of prey, very closely because they fear they may also be especially vulnerable to bird flu. In the Netherlands, for example, peregrine falcon numbers have fallen and there have been widespread declines linked to avian flu in the USA as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe worry that birds of prey are going to be repeatedly hit year on year because they are scavenging and predating on infected species,\u201d says Gold.<\/p>\n

There is some evidence for reduced breeding success of golden and white-tailed eagles in Scotland and even a downtick in buzzard numbers, one of the UK\u2019s most successful, widespread raptors.<\/p>\n

Across Europe, the winter of 2025\u201326 took an especially great toll on common cranes. Footage from Germany shows workers in full protective gear piling dozens of carcasses on top of one another at a wetland site called Linum, near Berlin, which is heavily used by migrating cranes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have never experienced anything like this, certainly not with cranes, which had not been affected by bird flu until now,\u201d says Norbert Schneeweiss, a biologist who heads the Rinluch Species Competence Centre at the Brandenburg Environmental Agency.<\/p>\n

More than 1,000 dead cranes were found at this one location, and one piece of research has estimated that more than 40,000 individuals, which is 10 per cent of the entire western flyway population, have died.<\/p>\n

So far, bird flu hasn\u2019t infected cranes in Britain but it remains to be seen whether the situation stays that way.<\/p>\n

The winter of 2025\u201326 has been bad for whooper swans, with hundreds succumbing to the disease in strongholds such as the Ouse Washes.<\/p>\n

What the future holds is unclear but, from South Georgia to the Solway Firth, conservationists are resigned to the fact that bird flu is here to stay.<\/p>\n

Top image: king penguins with chicks in South Georgia, Antarctica. Credit: Scott Portelli\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 23rd October 2023, a short press release from the government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-537193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}