Did you have "rabid seals attack" on your 2024 dystopia bingo card? 'Everyone was paddling to get away,' The Guardian quotes one swimmer in South Africa assailed by the unfortunate beasts. Surfers paddle at their peril.
Last month, a single seal bit several surfers in a matter of minutes and another seal swam ashore with horrific facial injuries that could only have been inflicted by a seriously aggressive animal. These attacks convinced authorities to euthanise four animals and send their bodies to be tested for rabies.
Three of those four seals tested positive, and the number of cases has since risen to nine.
A team of scientists from the University of Pretoria noticed unusually aggressive seals in 2021 and suspected rabies had reached the population there, but it was so unlikely—previously only reported on the cold and windswept Norwgian island Svalbard—that it took years to confirm the hypothesis. They're now sequencing the virus to figure out how it got there. Rabies is endemic to other species in the region.
"We are retrospectively testing euthanised animals," he says. "We are very fortunate that Sea Search has sampled and kept 120 brains over the last two and a half years."
I'm very glad they kept 120 brains.
