In what the Department of Agriculture is calling ‘a complete bollocks of a situation,’ an outbreak of avian influenza has decimated 75% of the pup population on a remote Australian island. That’s right, chums. The same bird flu that had us all pretending we’d never licked a chicken in 2020 has now evolved a taste for marine mammals. Specifically, baby seals. The defenceless, googly-eyed, utterly blameless kind. Because of course it has.
The carnage unfolded on Australia’s sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, a windswept rock where the only residents are scientists, penguins, and seals who thought they’d escaped the horrors of modern life. Newsflash: nowhere is safe. The virus, a high-pathogenicity H5N1 strain, tore through the colony like a vindictive toddler through a LEGO set. Of the 1,000 or so pups born last season, only 250 remain. That’s a 75% kill rate, which in any other context would be called a victory lap for Darwin. But here, it’s a tragedy.
‘We’re seeing widespread neurological symptoms,’ said Dr. Aila Karttunen, a wildlife vet who sounds like she’s been crying into her instant coffee. ‘Seals twitching, seizing, unable to swim. It’s a slow, miserable way to go.’ And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that no creature deserves a death that’s both slow and miserable. Not even mosquitoes, though we make exceptions.
The source of the outbreak? Migratory birds, nature’s own bio-terrorists. They’ve been spreading H5N1 around the globe for years, but this is the first time it’s hit seals this hard. ‘It’s a new level of interspecies betrayal,’ said Professor Marcus Hargreaves of the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness. ‘First chickens, then foxes, now seals. What’s next? Koalas? We’re one sneeze away from a pandemic that makes COVID look like a mild cold.’
And here’s the kicker: no one knows what to do. The island is too remote for mass vaccination. Culling is impractical because the virus is already everywhere. So we just… watch. We watch baby seals die, twitching and confused, while scientists take notes and the government issues statements about ‘monitoring the situation.’ The same government that spent billions on a submarine that can’t find its own arse. But sure, let’s monitor.
Meanwhile, the poultry industry is in full panic mode. If the virus jumps from seals to chickens, we’ll have egg shortages again. And if it jumps from seals to humans? Well, we’ll have a headline that writes itself: ‘Bird Flu Now Seals The Deal On Human Extinction.’ But don’t worry. Our leaders have a plan. I can tell because they keep saying ‘plan’ without any details.
So here we are, wiping our eyes with tissues made from endangered forests, mourning a species that we’ve only just started to care about because they’re cute and dying. But let’s be honest: the real casualty here is our belief that nature makes any sense. The bird flu didn’t just kill three-quarters of a seal colony. It killed the idea that we can keep viruses in their place. And as the corpses wash up on southern shores, reeking of irony and something worse, we’re left with one question: how long until it’s our turn?
Answer: ask the seals. They’d tell you, but they can’t. They’re gone.
