The sudden deaths of tens of thousands of endangered antelopes in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan over the past two weeks have left scientists scrambling for answers and conservationists worried about the animal’s future.
More than 120,000 rare saiga antelopes — more than one-third of the total global population — have been wiped out in a devastating blow that the UN Environment Programme has called “catastrophic.”
UN experts have said that the mass deaths are attributable to “a combination of biological and environmental factors.”
Scientists have struggled to identify the exact nature of a disease suspected of killing entire herds, but say that findings point toward an infectious disease caused by various bacteria.
Any infections have likely been exacerbated by recent rains that have made the antelopes — 90 percent of which live on the steppes of central Asian Kazakhstan — less able to cope with diseases.
“Unseasonal wetness may have been something that lowered their immunity to infection, but until we do more analysis, we will not know anything for sure,” the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative’s Steffen Zuther told reporters.
The rate of the deaths has staggered those who have studied the species — whose ancestors have inhabited the region since the ice age.
“A 100 percent mortality for the herds affected is extraordinary,” said Richard Kock, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London who recently returned from Kazakhstan. “We are dealing with creatures that have fairly low resilience.”
The sudden spate of deaths comes as a nasty shock, as up until recently the saiga antelopes — which can live for up to 10 years and are known for their protruding noses — had been seen as something of a conservation success.
Until the middle of this month, when the Kazakh Ministry of Agriculture began reporting the deaths, saiga numbers in Kazakhstan had rallied from an estimated 20,000 in 2003 to more than 250,000.
In 1993, there were more than 1 million saiga antelopes, mostly concentrated in the steppes of Kazakhstan, neighboring Russia and Mongolia.
The susceptibility of the population since then has raised extinction fears and the saiga is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
While herds that have not already been struck down are thought to be safe for the moment, Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov on Thursday set up a working group including international experts to establish reasons for the deaths and oversee disinfection of lands in the three regions where the saiga died.
“If there is one positive that has come from this, it is that the government has become very open to international channels of cooperation now,” Kock said.
However, scientists estimate that it would take a decade for the antelope numbers to recover from the recent deaths.
For now, they are hoping that the beasts can avoid even more potent diseases that have raged in nearby areas, such as the morbillivirus epidemic that swept across neighboring China last year, and other threats.
One of those is the rise in poaching for the animal’s horn — prized in Chinese medicine — which grew widespread following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but has slowed down since.
Kazakhstan extended a ban on hunting the saiga until 2021 four years ago and imposes penalties of up to five years in prison for poachers.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
BARRIER BLAME: An aviation expert questioned the location of a solid wall past the end of the runway, saying that it was ‘very bad luck for this particular airplane’ A team of US investigators, including representatives from Boeing, on Tuesday examined the site of a plane crash that killed 179 people in South Korea, while authorities were conducting safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air died in Sunday’s crash. Video showed the aircraft, without its landing gear deployed, crash-landed on its belly and overshoot a runaway at Muan International Airport before it slammed into a barrier and burst into flames. The plane was seen having engine trouble.
RSS