Thousands of dead seabirds are washing up on Australia’s beaches. Researchers want to know why

Researcher Jennifer Lavers says the mass mortality events are unusual for shearwaters, and did not ‘make sense from an evolutionary perspective’. Photograph: Lauren Roman

Thousands of short-tailed shearwaters are washing up dead on Australian east coast beaches and researchers are uncertain of the cause and scale of these seabird “wrecks”.

Each spring about 20 million shearwaters, also called yula or muttonbirds, fly 15,000km back to southern Australia from the northern hemisphere. Since late October, dead shearwaters have been turning up on beaches in south-east Queensland, followed by similar reports in New South Wales and Victoria in recent weeks.