<
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333567-saiga-antelopes-have-increased-10-fold-after-mass-die-off-in-2015/>
"Saiga antelopes have rebounded after being hunted to the brink of extinction
less than two decades ago and sustaining huge losses to disease in 2015. An
estimated 1.3 million saiga now roam the vast steppe grasslands of Kazakhstan,
a 30-fold increase from their population of less than 40,000 in 2005.
“I went [to the Kazakh steppe] in 2006 and we saw maybe seven saiga in a week,”
says Mark Day, who leads the Kazakh Steppe Conservation Programme at the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). “Now, all you hear is this mooing
sound. You’re surrounded by tens of thousands of saiga. It is an amazing
transformation.”
Millions of these antelopes (
Saiga tatarica) once grazed alongside woolly
mammoths and steppe bison throughout the Eurasian grasslands. But the collapse
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to widespread unchecked poaching of
the goat-sized animals for meat and horns, and the population dwindled to tens
of thousands.
Land protections and hunting bans gave saiga the space to reproduce, and by the
mid-2010s, there were 250,000 antelopes on the Kazakh steppe. Then, the
already-fragile population was hit by a fatal bacterial pathogen that swept
through half of the world’s saiga antelopes within a few weeks.
While it was a serious blow to the species, hoofed mammals like antelopes can
make astonishing rebounds from mass die-offs. Female saiga have multiple calves
at once, and with no predators, their numbers have been skyrocketing since. An
aerial drone survey done by RSPB this past spring estimates there are now
around 1,318,000 antelopes on the steppe."
Via
Future Crunch Aug 20, 2022:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-on-cervical-cancer-in-rwanda-a-climate-bill-for-the-united-states-and-saiga-antelope-in-kazakhstan/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
