MA: Wellfleet Virus blamed for eider duck deaths on Cape Cod

[Shiloh]

Source: http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120310/NEWS/203100335/-1/NEWSMAP

Virus blamed for eider duck deaths
By Doug Fraser
dfraser@capecodonline.com
March 10, 2012

WELLFLEET ? A virus is not the kind of thing to have named after your town, but for the past six years scientists have focused on finding out why common eider ducks have been dying by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, in the fall along the shore of Wellfleet Bay.

Veterinarians at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine led the investigation, along with the University of Georgia-based Southeast Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study and the National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin.

"It's pretty clear, between what the National Wildlife lab found and from the Southeast Cooperative, that there is a new virus found in eiders in Wellfleet that hasn't been detected before," said Sarah Courchesne, project director for the Seabird Ecological Assessment Network at Tufts veterinary school...

...Loosely related to the flu virus, it attacks the liver and gallbladders and seems to work very fast. Eider ducks collected from these mass die-offs appear healthy. They are not emaciated from a long illness in which they can't feed...

...So far, Wellfleet Bay is the only place in the world known to harbor this virus, although the scientists believe it is related to an equally mysterious Quarjavirus family that is distributed around the world. Ticks spread the diseases in colonies of nesting birds...

 

[Shiloh]

Re: MA: Wellfleet Virus blamed for eider duck deaths on Cape Cod

Source: http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140518/NEWS/405180328

What's killing the ducks?
By Doug Fraser
dfraser@capecodonline.com
May 18, 2014

WELLFLEET ? People walking the beach on Indian Neck in the late summer of 2007 were surprised to find dead ducks among the seashells and seaweed in the wrack line. Not just a few, but hundreds, with more staggering around on the shore, so ill they were uncharacteristically oblivious to the people nearby.

In all, 3,000 common eiders washed up dead or died along the Wellfleet shoreline that fall. Although there had been occasional eider die-offs throughout the town's history, the 2007 incident was a watershed moment, not just because of the numbers of dead, but for the fact that the sick eiders were predominantly female.

Scientists also worried that the die-offs, which typically numbers between 300 and 400 a year, were occurring every year in one particular spot. They eventually named it the Wellfleet Bay virus.

But even after researchers isolated the virus behind the die-offs, an orthomyxovirus they had never seen before but which they theorized was most likely transmitted by tick bites during the nesting season, there were still so many unanswered questions...