Bird flu reaches Antarctica for first time, putting penguins at risk

“This discovery demonstrates for the first time that the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has reached Antarctica, despite the distance and natural barriers that separate it from other continents,” officials said Sunday.

Over the past several years, the highly infectious-disease has devastated both wild and domestic animal populations, making its way around the globe through the migratory routes of birds. Now the arrival of avian influenza on the southernmost continent threatens its unique wildlife, including its iconic penguins.

The virus has proven potent enough to jump from birds to mammals, striking elephant seals and other marine mammals that congregate on shore. It has made its way to every continent expect Australia.

“We’ve never seen such a massive spread of virus in wild birds, and we’ve never seen such massive infections of wild mammals,” Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said last month.

For farms, the global outbreak poses a high economic cost as the virus kills millions of chickens and other poultry birds. In the wild, the disease is threatening to upend ecosystems and edge endangered birds closer to extinction.

Penguins on Antarctica may not have much immunity to the disease, since the virus has not been documented on the continent until now. Outbreaks among penguins in South America and Africa show their vulnerability. The birds, which like to waddle together in packed colonies, are not particularly good at social distancing.

Many penguins in Antarctica are already at risk of disappearing as rising temperatures deplete the sea ice they need to feed, breed and defend themselves. In 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the continent’s emperor penguins are threatened with extinction due to climate change.

CSIC said scientists obtained samples from the two dead skuas using “maximum security measures to prevent transmission of the virus to people,” sending them by ship to the Spanish base on Deception Island for testing.

Avian influenza has been creeping toward the continent for months. There have been other suspected cases of bird flu on Antarctica in recent weeks, according to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. For many scientists, its arrival was inevitable.

In October, British scientists found the virus in brown skuas roughly 1,000 miles away from Antarctica on Bird Island in the British territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. And in January, on the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, researchers found the flu in Gentoo penguins for the first time. Another 35 penguins there were found dead or displaying symptoms of the flu.