Bird flu found in Macquarie Island seal and gull samples
H5 bird flu has been detected in samples from a southern elephant seal and a kelp gull. Officials report no signs of mass wildlife mortality on the island so far.
H5 bird flu has been detected in samples from a southern elephant seal and a kelp gull on Macquarie Island, about 1,500 kilometres south-east of Hobart. Tasmanian Environment Minister Guy Barnett said the seal result was the state’s first recorded detection in a marine mammal. Federal Agriculture Minister Julie Collins said there were no signs of mass wildlife mortality on the island at the time of her statement.
Island staff collected the samples and brought them back for testing, according to Barnett as reported by Pulse Tasmania. Collins said the positive samples would undergo further testing at a CSIRO laboratory, ABC News reported. The H5 detection establishes that the virus was present in the sampled animals; the reported results do not establish how widely it has spread on the island.
Other Macquarie Island wildlife tests
Collins told Parliament that samples from skuas, giant petrels and penguins had tested negative. Macquarie Island is a World Heritage-listed wildlife sanctuary that supports up to four million seabirds and 100,000 seals, according to ABC. The size of those populations makes the potential effect on wildlife a concern even though officials had not reported a mass mortality event there.
ABC reported that expeditioners were brought back amid concern about the psychological impact of witnessing a possible mass mortality event. The Australian Antarctic Division had planned to extract island personnel because of that risk, according to ABC’s earlier reporting in August. Those preparations preceded the reported positive test results; they were made in anticipation of a possible outbreak.
Why authorities are concerned about elephant seals
The concern follows losses at Heard Island, where more than 13,000 elephant seal pups are believed to have died from bird flu over summer, ABC reported. ABC raised the possibility that as many as 90 per cent of Macquarie Island’s elephant seal pups could perish, drawing on the Heard Island experience. That figure describes a feared scenario, while Collins reported no signs of mass mortality on Macquarie Island.
Elsewhere in Tasmania, Pulse Tasmania reported 50 bird flu events as of Wednesday, with four new detections since October 7. An event can include one or more confirmed cases at a location. The newly reported detections involved a Pacific gull at St Helens, a greater crested tern at Bridport, a little penguin at Cooee and a black currawong on Flinders Island.
Pulse reported no detections in commercial poultry or backyard flocks and no mass bird deaths in Tasmania at the time of its report. Barnett asked the public to keep reporting sick or dead birds. People should avoid touching them, according to both reports; Pulse gave the emergency animal disease hotline as 1800 675 888.
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Sources and context
- Bird flu detected in seal, bird samples taken from remote southern islandABC News; ABC reporting
- Bird flu found in elephant seal on Macquarie IslandPulse Tasmania
AI-assisted article checked against the listed sources. NewsJaws did not conduct interviews or attend the reported events.