Threat of contagion: Fallout of bird flu infecting marine mammals

By Apoorva Mandavilli, Emily Anthes

NEW YORK: In her three decades of working with elephant seals, Dr. Marcela Uhart had never seen anything like the scene on the beaches of Argentina's Valdes Peninsula last October. It was peak breeding season; the beach should have been teeming with harems of fertile females and enormous males battling one another for dominance. Instead, it was just carcass upon carcass upon carcass, recalled Dr. Uhart, who directs the Latin American wildlife health program at the University of California, Davis.

H5N1, one of the many viruses that cause bird flu, had already killed at least 24,000 South American sea lions along the continent's coasts in less than a year. Now it had come for elephant seals.

Pups of all ages, from newborns to the fully weaned, lay dead or dying at the high-tide line. Sick pups lay listless, foam oozing from their mouths and noses. Dr. Uhart called it an image from hell.

In the weeks that followed, she and a colleague  protected head to toe with gloves, gowns and masks, and periodically dousing themselves with bleach  carefully documented the devastation. Team members stood atop the nearby cliffs, assessing the toll with drones. What they found was staggering: The virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups, more than 95 percent of the colony's young animals. The catastrophe was the latest in a bird flu epidemic that has whipped around the world since 2020, prompting authorities on multiple continents to kill poultry and other birds by the millions. In the United States alone, more than 90 million birds have been culled in a futile attempt to deter the virus.

There has been no stopping H5N1. Avian flu viruses tend to be picky about their hosts, typically sticking to one kind of wild bird. But this one has rapidly infiltrated an astonishingly wide array of birds and animals, from squirrels and skunks to bottlenose dolphins, polar bears and, most recently, dairy cows.

In my flu career, we have not seen a virus that expands its host range quite like this, said Troy Sutton, a virologist who studies avian and human influenza viruses at Penn State University.

The blow to sea mammals, and to dairy and poultry industries, is worrying enough. But a bigger concern, experts said, is what these developments portend: The virus is adapting to mammals, edging closer to spreading among people. A human pandemic is by no means inevitable. So far at least, the changes in the virus do not signal that H5N1 can cause a pandemic, Dr. Sutton said.

Still, he said, We really don't know how to interpret this or what it means. A highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 was identified in 1996 in domestic waterfowl in China. The next year, 18 people in Hong Kong became infected with the virus, and six died. The virus then went silent, but it resurfaced in Hong Kong in 2003. Since then, it has caused dozens of outbreaks in poultry and affected more than 800 people who were in close contact with the birds.

All the while, it continued to evolve.

The version of H5N1 currently racing across the world emerged in Europe in 2020 and spread quickly to Africa and Asia. It killed scores of farmed birds, but unlike its predecessors it also spread widely among wild birds and into many other animals.

Most infections of mammals were probably dead-end cases: a fox, perhaps, that ate an infected bird and died without passing on the virus. But a few larger outbreaks suggested that H5N1 was capable of more. The first clue came in the summer of 2022, when the virus killed hundreds of seals in New England and Quebec. A few months later, it infiltrated a mink farm in Spain.

In the mink, at least, the most likely explanation was that H5N1 had adapted to spread among the animals. The scale of the outbreaks in sea mammals in South America underscored that probability. Even intuitively, I would think that mammal-to-mammal transmission is very likely, said Malik Peiris, a virologist and expert in bird flu at the University of Hong Kong.

After it was first detected in South America, in birds in Colombia in October 2022, the virus swept down the Pacific coast to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the continent, and up the Atlantic coast. Along the way, it killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, and tens of thousands of sea lions, in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The sea lions behaved erratically, experiencing convulsions and paralysis; pregnant females miscarried their fetuses.

What happened when the virus moved to South America we had never seen before, Dr. Uhart said.

Exactly how and when the virus jumped to marine mammals is unclear, but the sea lions most likely came into close contact with infected birds or contaminated droppings. (Although fish make up the bulk of sea lions diet, they do sometimes eat birds.)

At some point, its likely the virus evolved to spread directly among the marine mammals: In Argentina, the sea lion deaths did not coincide with the mass mortality of wild birds.

This could suggest that the infection source was not the infected birds, said Dr. Pablo Plaza, a wildlife veterinarian at the National University of Comahue and National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina.

It is not hard to imagine how the virus might disperse in these animals: Elephant seals and sea lions both breed in colonies, crowding together on beaches where they fight, mate and bark at one another. Elephant seals sneeze all day, dispersing large droplets of mucus each time they do.

It is difficult to prove exactly how and when the virus moved from one species to another. But genetic analysis supports the theory the marine mammals acquired their infections from one another, not birds. Samples of virus isolated from sea lions in Peru and Chile and from the elephant seals in Argentina all share about 15 mutations not seen in the birds; the same mutations were also present in a Chilean man who was infected last year.

There are numerous opportunities for H5N1 to jump from sea mammals into people. One sick male elephant seal that sat for a day and a half on a public beach in Argentina turned out to carry enormous amounts of virus. In Peru, scientists collected samples from sea lion carcasses that lay alongside families enjoying a beach day.

Scavenging animals, such as dogs, could also pick up the virus from an infected carcass and then spread it more broadly: None of the wildlife exists in their little silos, said Wendy Puryear, a virologist at Tufts University who studied the New England seal outbreaks.

In some South American countries, apart from a few carcasses that were buried, the rest have remained on the beaches, rotting and scavenged upon.

How do you even scale up to remove 17,000 dead bodies out in the middle of nowhere, places where you can't even bring down machinery, and humongous cliffs? Dr. Uhart said.