Passengers who’d hoped to stroll with penguins on a cruise across the Antarctic Peninsula and the island of South Georgia weren’t allowed to go ashore, however they witnessed distressing scenes of animals that had been killed by a hen flu outbreak within the area. Passenger Astrid Saunders tells the Guardian that the ship was allowed to anchor in Grytviken on South Georgia, however they weren’t permitted to disembark. “We weren’t allowed to go as much as the grave of Ernest Shackleton as a result of there have been so many useless seals blocking the best way,” she says. The Antarctic explorer had a coronary heart assault throughout his ultimate expedition in 1922 and is one in every of 64 folks buried within the Grytviken cemetery.
Saunders says that whereas it is not simple to inform useless seals from resting ones, there gave the impression to be a whole bunch of useless ones. “There appeared to be an terrible lot of our bodies on the seashore,” she says. “A variety of seal pups with no mum. They had been desperately attempting to run round.” Colette Engstrom, one other passenger on the January cruise, says passengers had been instructed they could not go to the grave as a result of ” all of the seals—or lots of the seals—had been useless, and hen flu was being blamed.” British Antarctic Survey seabird ecologist Norman Ratcliffe says researchers have noticed “widespread mortality alongside the north coast of South Georgia.” Fowl flu has been present in seals, skuas, terns, albatrosses, and, most not too long ago, penguins.
“I liken South Georgia to the Alps, with Serengeti-style wildlife round it,” Ratcliffe tells the BBC. “The wildlife concentrations across the coast are simply phenomenal—a number of species of penguins, albatrosses, and seals.” Researchers says hen flu has been detected in gentoo and king penguins on the island, however penguin breeding season is nearly over, so the impression on populations could also be restricted, for now. Researchers have warned, nonetheless, that it could possibly be “one of many largest ecological disasters of contemporary occasions” if the H5N1 virus hits Antarctic penguin populations, per the Guardian. (Extra hen flu tales.)