12,000 endangered saiga antelope found dead in Kazakhstan

Nearly 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelope have been found dead within a 17 square-mile area of the Ural region of western Kazakhstan, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The cause of the mysterious mass loss is still unclear, though initial investigators believed the animals may have been poisoned.
          
"This is a tragic and shocking event. It's particularly unfortunate that the population was just emerging from an unusually harsh winter, and that those struck down are mostly females and this year's calves," said professor E.J. Milner-Gulland, chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance.
 
The event is being called a conservation catastrophe, as the losses amount to a nearly 50 percent drop in population for the Ural group and a 15 percent drop for the entire species in Kazakhstan. Listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, the saiga population as a whole has declined by 95 percent since 1995.
 
Though the animals once roamed widely throughout the Eurasian steppe zone and even as far as the British Isles to the west and Alaska and the Yukon to the east, only five populations of the antelope still remain — in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia.
 
Reports indicate that the immediate cause of the deaths is due to an outbreak of the bacterial infection known as pasteurellosis, but the underlying cause of the epidemic is still unidentified. The pasteurella bacterium occurs naturally and is typically benign in healthy antelope, and it only becomes deadly when the animal's immune system is compromised because of stress, malnutrition or even poisoning.
 
To prevent further outbreak, veterinarians and emergency officials are reportedly burning the carcasses and organizing immediate quarantine measures, hoping to keep the population from crashing entirely.

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