Protozoa, miscellaneous — Worldwide/Unknown
When wildlife pathologists arrived at Hay Island off the coast of Nova Scotia in March 2012, they met an eerie sight. Of the thousands of silver and black-speckled gray seals that lay on the rocky outcrop, roughly one fifth were dead, despite showing no outward signs of disease. Necropsies revealed that 406 dead seals were infested with a crescent moon-shaped parasite that had destroyed their livers, but it wasn’t clear what the organism was or how the seals had contracted the parasite.
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