A bird flu outbreak on a remote, sub-Antarctic island has decimated the world’s largest population of southern elephant seals, scientists have found. After the virus arrived on the island of South Georgia in 2023, the number of breeding females fell 47%, according to a new aerial survey of the three largest seal colonies on the island.

“It painted a starker picture than I was expecting,” said Connor Bamford, a marine ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey who led the study, which was published in the journal Communications Biology last week.

If all of the South Georgia seal colonies suffered similar losses, it could mean that more than 50,000 females disappeared from the breeding population, the scientists reported.

It is at least the second time that the virus, known as H5N1, has ca

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