News Desk

Cape Town: Dead seals are washing up along the shore of South Africa’s port city of Cape Town amidst an outbreak of rabies in marine animal animals, said its coastal management official to news reporters.

Gregg Oelofse, Cape Town’s coastal manager, believes this to be the first spread of rabies within the population of marine mammals and that it is very concerning for them. Cases of rabies in seals are particularly rare and the only recently large disease spread in seals was back in 1980, in the Svalbard Islands of Norway.

Cape Town is home to thousands of Cape fur seals, a seal native to Southern Africa, along with a large number of beaches and a coastline stretching over 300 km. According to Oelofse, so far the city has recorded 11 positive cases of rabies in the seals, the last detected case being 10 days ago. However, he said that a large number of dead seals washing up along the shoreline is completely normal, confirming that many of them had actually died naturally.

Authorities reported that the first case was detected in October 2023, and by late June, a total of seven cases of the disease in seals spread across seven beaches of Cape Town and somewhere on the Western Cape, prompting them to warn residents to avoid contact with the carcasses. They have said that there is no need for panic in Cape Town, stating that although rabies is new in Cape fur seals, it is a common occurrence in many wildlife populations in South Africa.

In recent years, the area had dealt with many seal deaths, Western Cape provincial officials saying that back in November 2021, there were almost 200 dead seals which had all washed ashore in a single day, presumably due to malnutrition.