Biologist Valeria Falabella’s voice breaks as she describes the devastating scene. It was October 2023 when she and her team climbed down onto Punta Delgada Beach, in the Valdés Peninsula, a remote corner of central Argentina. While they were aware that avian flu had made its way across the Pacific, nothing had prepared them for what they were about to find. In the first harem of southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) something was off: several pups lay lifeless. “In that moment there weren’t many [dead pups], but as we kept walking we saw the first dead adult,” says Falabella, director of coastal marine conservation at WCS Argentina. “In all the time I’d worked on beaches surveying elephant seals, I’d never seen a dead one; it was shocking.” A few meters away, they found several South

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