For the last year and a half, Americans have watched and worried as H5N1 bird flu racked dairy herds and killed hundreds of millions of commercially raised chickens, turkeys and ducks.

But far less widely known is that the virus has devastated wildlife across the globe, killing millions of wild birds and mammals.

Few animals have been harder hit than elephant seals, sea lions and fur seals in the Southern Hemisphere. In some places thousands of carcasses and orphaned pups have littered the beaches.

On Thursday, a research team led by Connor Bamford, a marine ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, reported a 47% drop in breeding females between 2022 and 2024 in the three largest elephant seal colonies on South Georgia Island.

The elephant seals of South Georgia Island, located between South America and Antarctica in the South Atlantic, are the largest breeding colony on the planet.

The virus hit there in 2023, Bamford said, and researchers were there to see it. But it was their visit in 2024 that really drove the devastation home.

“Normally there’s about 6,000 seals on St. Andrews Bay,” he said, describing a two-mile strip of beach along the northeastern side of the island. Usually it’s hard to make your way through the animals, it’s so jam-packed.

But in 2024, “it was easy. There were massive gaps. There were so few of them,” he said.

Other large breeding colonies — including along the Argentinian coast, as well as several other islands north of the Antarctic Circle — have also been hit. In 2023, UC Davis researchers reported that nearly 97% of elephant seal pups died at Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes, the most deaths ever recorded for this species.

According to Ralph Vanstreels, a marine ecologist with UC Davis who is researching the animals in Argentina, two-thirds of southern elephant seal colonies are now infected. Only those near New Zealand and Australia have been spared.

“We’re just holding our breath,” in hopes the virus doesn’t get there, he said.

Vanstreels said genetic analyses show the strain of virus circulating in Argentina acquired mutations allowing it to pass easily between mammals. He said it’s not yet clear whether the virus that has hit other elephant seals and pinnipeds in the region carries the same mutations.

Nor does anyone know whether the virus will move north to populations along the California coast — or into people.

But it’s left a deadly wake.

Reports of southern sea lions, fur seals and crabeater seals dying en masse have come in from across the region.

Vanstreels and Bamford say there’s no way to know the full extent of the virus’ toll on these animals. Many of these species, such as crabeater seals, are so remote that there are few, if any human observers to witness the devastation.

More than 30,000 sea lions in Peru and Chile died between 2022 and 2024. In Argentina, roughly 1,300 sea lions and fur seals perished.

A researcher launches a drone on the island of South Georgia, home to the world’s largest southern elephant seal population.

(British Antarctic Survey)

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Vanstreels said researchers don’t yet have any clear idea about why northern elephant seals and marine mammals in the north Pacific, including those that breed along the California coast, have been spared.

He said the strain circulating off the North American Pacific coast doesn’t carry the mutations seen in South America, so that may be why. There may also be differences in population densities or in the local marine ecosystem.

“We think the South American sea lion played a big role in transmission, carrying the virus along the coast and perhaps introducing it to the elephant seal population,” he said. “Maybe the areas where the Northern elephant seal lives don’t have as good a vector for the infection to be spread.”

Bamford and Vanstreels say the loss of this many animals will probably affect the broader ecosystem as well.

For example, elephant seal placentas are a major source of food for a variety of coastal animals, such as birds and crabs. In addition, the seals’ deep-sea foraging brings nutrients to the ocean surface, where fish, kelp, shrimp and other sea life depend on their waste and refuse for sustenance.

“You get rid of half of their population, that’s going to have an impact,” Vanstreels said.

When Jesse Marquez walked into the Los Angeles harbor commission hearing room in 2013, he didn’t bring a consultant or a slideshow. He brought death certificates.

Each sheet of paper, he told the commissioners, bore the name of a Wilmington resident killed by respiratory illness. Wedged between two of the country’s busiest ports, the neighborhood is dotted with oil refineries, chemical plants, railyards and freeways. It’s one of several portside communities known by some as a “diesel death zone,” where residents are more likely to die from cancer than just about anywhere else in the L.A. Basin. For decades, Marquez refused to let anyone forget it.

He knocked on doors, installed air monitors, counted oil wells, built coalitions, staged demonstrations, fought legal battles and affected policy. He dove deep into impenetrable environmental impact documents.

“Before Jesse, there was no playbook.” Earthjustice attorney Adrian Martinez said in an interview. “What was remarkable from the beginning is that Jesse wasn’t afraid to write stuff down, to demand things, to spend lots of time scouring for evidence.”

Marquez, founder of the Coalition for a Safe Environment, or CFASE, died surrounded by family in his Orange County home Nov. 3. His death was due to complications after he was struck by a vehicle while in a crosswalk in January. He was 74.

“He was one of a kind,” Martinez said. “He had a fierce independence and really believed in speaking up for himself and his community. He played an instrumental role in centering Wilmington in the fight for environmental justice.”

In 2001, when the port planned to ramp up operations and expand a major terminal operated by Trapac Inc. further north into Wilmington, Marquez and neighborhood organizers pushed back, winning a $200-million green-space buffer between residences and port operations.

When oil refineries evaded pollution caps through what organizers called a “gaping loophole” in Environmental Protection Agency policy, Marquez and others sued, overturning the policy and successfully curtailing pollution spikes at California plants.

And when cargo ships idled at California ports burning diesel fuel, Marquez and his allies pressed the state to adopt the nation’s first rule requiring vessels to turn off their engines and plug into the electric grid while docked.

Born Oct. 22, 1951, Marquez was raised in Wilmington, and lived most of his life there. As a child, he had a view of Fletcher Oil Co.’s towering smokestacks from his frontyard.

Years later, black pearls of petroleum rained down on Wilmington the day the oil refinery exploded.

Then 17, Marquez hit the floor when he heard the blast. Frantic, he helped his parents hoist his six younger siblings over a backyard fence as fireballs of ignited crude descended around their home, just across the street. His grandmother was the last over, suffering third-degree burns along the entire left side of her body.

“From that moment on, he’s always had Wilmington in his mind,” his 44-year-old son, Alex Marquez, said in an interview.

The memory shaped the battles he fought decades later. In college at UCLA, he crossed paths with young members of the Brown Berets, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, and the Black Panther Party, later volunteering in demonstrations led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

“He started off within that movement,” Alex Marquez said. “It was his reason to bring a lot of different communities into his work.”

After a career in aerospace, he began organizing in earnest in the 1990s, aligning with groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Coalition for Clean Air to oppose port expansion projects.

When his sons were old enough, he brought them along to photograph and count oil wells, later folding them into his other projects.

He described his father as a man of contrasts.

“When it was time to work, he was the most serious, stern, no patience,” Alex Marquez said. “But the minute the job was done, he completely transformed. He was your best friend who brought a roast turkey and a six-pack of beers. He partied and relaxed better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Marquez’s home was always filled with dogs — he jokingly called his lawyers his “legal beagles,” Martinez recalled. He loved reggae music, dancing and was an amateur archaeologist. He kept a collection of colonial maps tracing the migration of the Aztec people, part of what his son called “his love for Native American and Aztec culture.”

He founded CFASE with a group of Wilmington residents. After learning about the port’s expansion plans, he hosted an ad hoc meeting at his home. There, residents shared their experiences with industrial pollution in Wilmington.

They talked about the refinery explosions in 1969, 1984, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996 and 2001.

“Then someone says, ‘Well, I have two kids and they have asthma,’” Jesse Marquez recalled in a media interview in January. “And then someone else says, ‘All three of my kids have asthma — My mom has asthma — I have asthma.’”

The group would play a central role in developing the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach’s landmark Clean Air Action Plan and Clean Truck Program, which replaced more than 16,000 diesel rigs with cleaner models.

It pushed for zero-emission truck demonstrations, solar power installations, and won millions of dollars for communities for public health and air-quality projects.

The coalition helped negotiate a $60-million settlement in the seminal China Shipping terminal case — securing local health grants, truck retrofit funds and the first Port Community Advisory Committee in the U.S. — and later helped establish the Harbor Community Benefit Foundation, which funds air filtration, land use, and job-training initiatives across Wilmington and San Pedro.

Marquez’s group also fought off proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals, oil tank farms and hydrogen power plants.

Since 2005, diesel emissions at the Port of Los Angeles have plummeted by 90%.

Now Alex Marquez finds himself suddenly in charge of the nonprofit his father built.

He’s been learning to manage the group’s finances, fix its monitoring equipment and reconnect with its network of allies.

“It’s literally been a crash course in how to run a nonprofit,” he said. “But we’re keeping it alive.”

In Wilmington, residents point to visible symbols of Marquez’s work: the waterfront park, the electrified port terminals and the health surveys that documented decades of illness.

“He left us too early, but a movement that was just budding when he started decades ago has now blossomed into national and even international networks,” Martinez wrote in a tribute to Marquez.

Marquez is survived by his sons Alex Marquez, Danilo Marquez, Radu Iliescu and, the many who knew him say, the environmental justice movement writ large.

A rural legal aid group is suing the California Department of Food and Agriculture for refusing to disclose the locations of dairies infected with H5N1 bird flu.

More than half of the 70 confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu infection in the United States in the last year and a half have been in California dairy workers.

California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit that provides free civil legal services to low-income rural residents, together with the First Amendment Coalition, says the California agriculture department is withholding information that could protect the public and allow front-line responders, such as health clinics and labor groups, to assist farmworkers and others at risk of infection.

“As a matter of first principle, the California Constitution and the California Public Records Act enshrine the strong right of the public to inspect the conduct of its public officials and to ensure that they are basically executing the duties that are given to them,” said David Cremins, an attorney with the rural legal group. The suit was filed Monday in Sacramento County Superior Court.

A spokesman for the state’s agriculture agency said he could not provide comment “because the matter is in litigation.”

Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive of Western United Dairies — California’s largest dairy trade group — also declined to comment.

It was a surprise when H5N1 bird flu was found to have infected Texas dairy cattle in March 2024. It soon spread to workers. Most cases in the U.S. have been mild, but one person in Louisiana died, and several others were hospitalized.

Globally, H5N1 has killed hundreds of people. Until recently, its mortality rate was considered roughly 50%. It has also killed millions of wild birds, mammals, domestic cats and commercial poultry. The virus was first discovered in China’s Guangdong province in 1996.

Public health officials, epidemiologists and infectious disease researchers worry it would only take a minor mutation in the virus now circulating in dairy cows and commercial poultry to enable it to spread easily between people, or cause serious illness, or both. The more opportunities the virus has to move between individual animals or jump into new species, the greater the likelihood such changes could occur.

In December 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in response to H5N1 and said he wanted to make sure that “Californians have access to accurate, up-to-date information” about the disease.

The state did release information on outbreaks at poultry facilities and in wild animals at the county level. But it did not do so for dairy outbreaks.

Agriculture officials described the infected cattle only as being in “the Central Valley” — an area encompassing roughly 20,000 square miles — or Southern California — a roughly 56,000 square mile area.

More than 770 dairies in California have been infected since the outbreak began in 2024.

Such vague information is “completely useless in terms of trying to figure out how the flu is spreading around,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada.

“It’s a bit mystifying why that information isn’t clear and transparent,” she said. “I mean, when you’re dealing with an outbreak that has major implications in terms of both people’s livelihoods and in terms of the nation’s food supply, to not be more transparent about that, I think is actually really harmful in the long run, because it’s like, what are you guys doing? Like, why are you keeping this a secret?”

Cremins, the attorney, said it’s possible infections among dairy workers could have been avoided had location information been shared, because groups like his and “other members of the public” could have targeted “outreach and education to at-risk workers and communities.”

The plaintiffs also allege in their filing that the agriculture department’s “refusal to disclose the locations of H5N1 outbreaks … perpetuated a stark and unjustifiable information asymmetry: CDFA (the ag agency) and dairy producers know where and when bird flu outbreaks are occurring; CRLA (the legal organization), dairy workers, and the broader public do not.”

Other states, including Michigan, Arizona and Nevada, reported outbreaks at the county level.

The plaintiffs are seeking disclosure of quarantine records, a declaration from a judge that the agriculture agency violated the state’s open record laws, and — should they succeed — payment of attorney’s fees.