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When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground.
"But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed," Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science.
But within four days, the entire herd — 60,000 saiga — had died. As veterinarians and conservationists tried to stem the die-off, they also got word of similar population crashes in other herds across Kazakhstan. By early June, the mass dying was over.
Are mass-die-offs like these indications of stress in the larger ecosystem?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pav on Friday September 04 2015, @12:33AM
...they run faster than any natural predator, can breed after one year, and give birth to one, two or even three calves at a time.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @12:48AM
Maybe it is the dying.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday September 04 2015, @05:07PM
...they run faster than any natural predator,
How about a bullet? Almost every species of animals that has gone extinct or became endangered in the last few centuries, is because of man. Either because deliberate killing, or destruction of their environment, or similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon [wikipedia.org]
There used to be 5 billion pigeons like that in America. Flocks would blot out the sun, for days on end. Then people killed them, every last one, on industrial scale.
To me it's more amazing we have things living naturally that are larger than a cockroach. But maybe in next 100 years, the only place someone will be able to actually find a wolf or tiger is in a video.