Saiga Antelope

The saiga's bulbous, flexible, downward-hanging nose is one of the most distinctive faces of any mammal, and it does at least two jobs, both tied to the harsh open steppe. In summer, huge herds moving across dry ground raise clouds of dust, and the nose acts as an air filter — incoming air passes through enlarged, convoluted nasal chambers lined with mucus and fine hairs that trap dust before it reaches the lungs. In the brutal continental winter, when air temperatures fall far below freezing, the same large chambers, richly supplied with blood vessels, warm and humidify each breath before it reaches the lungs, reducing heat and moisture loss. The nose may also amplify and deepen the males' roaring calls during the rut.

In May 2015, in the space of about three weeks, more than 200,000 saiga died across the calving grounds of central Kazakhstan, essentially every animal in the affected herds, adults and newborns alike. Investigation showed the immediate killer was blood poisoning caused by Pasteurella multocida, a bacterium that normally lives harmlessly in the saiga's own respiratory tract. Something caused it to turn invasive and lethal simultaneously in animals across a huge area, and the leading explanation is weather — the affected days were unusually warm and humid, and this environmental trigger appears to have tipped the resident bacteria into a fatal systemic infection in already stressed, calving females. Similar but smaller die-offs from the same cause had occurred before, and the event is studied as an example of how climate conditions can trigger disease in wildlife.

The saiga has a life history built for boom-and-bust. Females can conceive in their first autumn, at only about seven or eight months old, and most adult females produce twins every year, so a population that has been knocked down can multiply very quickly if the survivors are protected. From a low point of roughly 50,000 animals worldwide in the mid-2000s — after poaching for meat and for the males' horns (used in traditional Chinese medicine) had collapsed the population by around 95 percent from its 1990s level — sustained anti-poaching enforcement, new protected areas, and international cooperation, especially in Kazakhstan, allowed the herds to rebound. By 2024 the global total exceeded 1.9 million, and in 2023 the IUCN moved the species from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened, one of the largest single conservation status improvements ever recorded for a mammal.

It is a member of the family Bovidae, the group that includes antelopes, cattle, sheep, and goats, and it is conventionally called an antelope, though genetically it sits on its own branch, most closely related to the gazelles and to the goat-antelopes. It is often described as an "Ice Age relict" — saiga or very close relatives ranged across the cold, dry mammoth steppe of the last glacial period alongside woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos, from Western Europe across Asia to Alaska and Canada. As the climate warmed and that habitat shrank and fragmented after the last ice age, most large steppe mammals went extinct, but the saiga survived in the dry grasslands of Central Asia, carrying its cold-adapted nose and nomadic, fast-breeding way of life into the present.