QUESTION Why Did Two-Thirds of Saiga Suddenly Drop Dead? - The Atlantic
It took just three weeks for two-thirds of all the world’s saiga to die. It took much longer to work out why.
The saiga is an endearing antelope, whose bulbous nose gives it the comedic air of a Dr. Seuss character. It typically wanders over large tracts of Central Asian grassland, but every spring, tens of thousands of them gather in the same place to give birth. These calving aggregations should be joyous events, but the gathering in May 2015 became something far more sinister when 200,000 saiga just dropped dead. They did so without warning, over a matter of days, in gathering sites spread across 65,000 square miles—an area the size of Florida. Whatever killed them was thorough and merciless: Across a vast area, every last saiga perished.
Richard Kock, a veterinarian and conservationist from the Royal Veterinary College, saw it all. He and his team were there on a routine monitoring trip to check the health of the population. “Mass mortality events are never nice things and I’ve experienced quite a few,” he says. “But the experience of the saiga was unprecedented, and unworldly. Even after 40 years of work, I just said: I don’t understand.”
To shorten the story , "Bacteria & Viruses" from prehistoric times are surfacing from the melting Permafrost in the Tundra, Alaska, & Siberia. The same effects that are described in the previous article that I posted earlier. See Link Below >
"Is There A Ticking Time Bomb Under The Arctic?"
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Bad news indeed for this friend of Saigas. I really hope this is a one off.
BanjoTango
Level 5
Jan 30, 2018
2
That new flu out there may combine wirh something from under the ice... maybe that's already happened.... yikes!
BucketlistBob
Level 8
Jan 30, 2018
2
Pasteurella multocida normally lives in the saiga’s respiratory tract, but Kock’s team found that the microbe had found its way into the animals’ blood, and invaded their livers, kidneys, and spleens. Wherever it went, it produced toxins that destroyed the local cells, causing massive internal bleeding. Blood pooled around their organs, beneath their skin, and around their lungs. The saigas drowned in their own bodily fluids.
But that answer just led to more questions. Pasteurella is common and typically harmless part of the saiga’s microbiome. In livestock, it can cause disease when animals are stressed, as sometimes happens when they’re shipped over long distances in bad conditions. But it has never been linked to a mass die-off of the type that afflicted the saigas. What could have possibly turned this docile Jekyll into such a murderous Hyde?
Only one factor fit the bill: climate. The places where the saigas died in May 2015 were extremely warm and humid. In fact, humidity levels were the highest ever seen the region since records began in 1948. The same pattern held for two earlier, and much smaller, die-offs from 1981 and 1988. When the temperature gets really hot, and the air gets really wet, saiga die. CLIMATE is the trigger, Pasteurella is the bullet.
Dougy
Level 7
Jan 29, 2018
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