The animals started to look a bit unhappy. Three hours later they were dead...

Posted Sunday morning, January 21, 2018.

Saiga antelope mother and calf via the New York Times.

I didn’t know there was a species of antelope called saiga living on the Eurasian steppes, let alone that they were endangered. This isn’t the reason I wish I was hearing about them now:

Saiga are a critically endangered antelope species with endearing elongated snouts. But the population took a hard hit in 2015 when over 200,000 of the creatures in central Kazakhstan​ died in a span of just three weeks…

“You went from one or two animals to within three or four days — thousands. And then they were all dead by the seventh day,” Richard Kock​, professor at The Royal Veterinary College…tells [NPR’s Merrit] Kennedy. “The animals were showing normal behavior, normal signs, normal grazing and then suddenly they’d start looking a little bit unhappy and stop feeding. Within about three hours they were dead.”

Two hundred thousand?

Smithsonian reports that only thirty-thousand survived the epidemic caused by what biologists suspect was a viral infection. Most of the survivors were bachelor males living farther north of the hardest hit saiga territories and small groups of females in remote areas---not an ideal ratio and placement for recovery.  The virus is ever-present in saigas. Scientists aren’t sure what triggered its sudden virulence but they’re thinking it was weather-related.

In the days leading up to the deaths, a period of unusually hot and humid weather struck, Kennedy reports. Though the bacteria typically live in the animals’ tonsils, this weather seemed to have somehow triggered their sudden migration to the creatures’ guts, Steph Yin reports for the New York Times. Subsequent blood poisoning killed the antelopes within a few hours after they showed their first symptoms.

The article doesn’t say anyone’s blaming the unusually warm and humid weather pattern on climate change. Not every odd weather event is caused by global warming. Similar weather hit the steppes at the same time as similar mass deaths of saigas in 1981 and 1988.

Saigas used to share the steppes with mammoths. That doesn’t make saigas a particularly ancient species, it’s just a reminder that species do go extinct.

The 100 percent fatality rate for creatures was unprecedented. “I’ve worked with many nasty things,” Kock tells Yin. “You always get survivors.” The unusual weather hit during the antelopes’ calving period, which may have enhanced the mortality rate as females are particularly vulnerable after giving birth…

While saiga herds originally roamed the Eurasian steppes in the era of mammoths, they’ve subsequently gone extinct in China and southwestern Mongolia, with the largest surviving populations living in Russia and Kazakhstan. The animals are historically robust, surviving and adapting. But although they breed rapidly, Kock fears they’re now on the verge of extinction.

“If we get a similar event, and all the animals are within a sort of weather envelope, it could be total extinction.” Kock tells Kennedy. “It could happen in a week.”

You can read Mika McKinnon’s whole article by following the link to Over 200,000 Endangered Antelope Suddenly Die Thanks to … Weird Weather? at Smithsonian. McKinnon has included links to more detailed stories at NPR and the New York Times that formed the basis for her report. At the New York Times I found a link to this bit of hopeful news: Saiga Population Grows After Mysterious Epidemic.