[Animals] This flexible-nosed antelope was about to disappear; 20 years later, hope increases

[FNX Magokiler]

Just two decades ago, it seemed as if we had to write a eulogy for the saiga antelope.

Decimated by widespread poaching and waves of disease, in 2003 only 6% of these flexible-nosed ungulates remained in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia and Uzbekistan.

But today, scientists rejoice at the saiga's unlikely recovery.

There are now 1.9 million saiga antelopes across Eurasia, according to the most recent estimates released this week. In fact, there are so many saiga that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has raised the species' status on the Red List from critically endangered to near threatened.

"There's a lot of pessimism about conservation and not much attention to the successes," says E.J. Milner-Gulland, a scientist at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the UK-based Saiga Conservation Alliance. "It is a vindication of 20 years of hard work by many people."

To give you an idea of how far this species has come, in 2015, more than half of the world's saiga antelope po[CENSORED]tion was lost to a mysterious blood disease.

"This is phenomenal news," Joel Berger, an ecologist at Colorado State University and senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in an email.

“At a time when so many species and po[CENSORED]tions are in deep decline, witnessing the recovery of the saiga – a species that deserves more recognition in its own right.

 

 

Is something we should all celebrate,” he says.

The downward spiral of the saiga
Those who have paid attention to the saiga saga know that it has been a wild ride.

"Twenty years ago it was the mammal whose threat status had increased most rapidly," explains Milner-Gulland. "The po[CENSORED]tion had plummeted more than 90% in a really short period of a few years, so it was directly in critical danger."

Regarding what happened, Milner-Gulland explains that the fall of the saiga can be attributed to several factors. To begin with, saiga horn has great value in China, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia as a component of traditional medicine. And this demand, together with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, caused a spectacular increase in hunting.

"The economies of these countries collapsed," he explains. "And they lived in very harsh conditions in the steppe. So they resorted to poaching."

Fences along the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also put a barrier in the middle of the saiga's migratory route, while infrastructure development cut into saiga habitat. Finally, an unknown trigger turned a microbe naturally present in the saiga's characteristic snout into a virulent pathogen, causing mass die-offs.

For all these reasons, the IUCN has chosen not to completely delist the saiga.

"The near-threatened category is appropriate for the saiga, because we know that at any time a large number of specimens could fall dead again," says Milner-Gulland. "They are very vulnerable."

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/12/antilope-nariz-flexible-saiga-casi-desapare-aumenta-esperanza-recuperacion-salvacion