Kazakhstan: Half of the world's population of Saiga Antelope have died since May 10th

[Ronan Kelly]

Mystery disease claims half world population of saiga antelopes

16:42 27 May 2015 by Andy Coghlan

The death toll of iconic saiga antelopes in central Asia has soared to around 120,000, almost half of the world's remaining population, according to unofficial estimates. Today vets and scientists investigating the catastrophe presented their results so far to government officials in Kazakhstan, where the animals are dying.

"The current official figure is 85,000, but we are hearing unofficial estimates in excess of 100,000, approaching 120,000," says Aline K?hl-Stenzel of the UN Convention on Migratory Species.

The animals began dying from an unidentified cause around 10 May. The death toll soared within days to 27,000, at which point the Kazakh government requested help from the secretariat of the convention. A team of vets, led by Richard Kock of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK, flew out on Friday.
...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l#.VWboec9VhBc

Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Kazakhstan's Massive Saiga Antelope Epizootic

# 10,102


Whenever a disease spread quickly and at unexpected rates among non-human animal species, it is called an epizootic. HPAI avian influenza is considered an epizootic, as it is both unusual and causes serious illness.

In contrast, low levels of fairly benign LPAI (low pathogenic) influenza viruses commonly found in wild birds are considered enzootic - or endemic in an animal population.

In addition to avian flu, we've looked as some significant epizootic events in history - but none was probably more dramatic than the great equine epizootic of 1872 (see Morens and Taubenberger: A New Look At The Panzootic Of 1872) which has been theorized to have been linked to concurrent outbreaks of poultry deaths across the country,

Ian York author of the Mystery Rays blog described the impact of this incident back in December of 2009 in a blog called Influenza before 1918, part II: 1872. A brief excerpt:

Without horses, business slammed to a halt; the mail didn't run, groceries didn't reach the cities, crops weren't harvested or transported. After a few weeks, most of the horses recovered and business followed, but the epizootic swept across the country (intensely tracked by the newspapers of the day, warning each city in turn that it was going to be attacked), finally fizzling out the following summer in British Columbia.
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http://afludiary.blogspot.com/2015/0...-antelope.html

See also: Pasteurellosis is main cause of mass deaths of saiga in Kostanai region (CA-News, May 30 2012)

and Kazakhstan:3,000 endangered antelopes dead of unknown causes from 2010

 

[Ronan Kelly]

Catastrophic Collapse of Saiga Antelopes in Central Asia


Bonn/Astana, 28 May 2015 ? More than 120,000 saiga antelope have been confirmed dead in central Kazakhstan, representing more than a third of the global population. This is a major blow for conservation efforts given that saigas have in the past ten years only just started to recover from a global population size of less than 50,000 animals following a 95% crash in numbers.

Preliminary analysis indicates that a combination of environmental and biological factors is contributing to this catastrophic event, which has seen four large birth aggregations of this critically endangered antelope eradicated since mid-May this year. Primarily mothers and calves are amongst the carcasses; not a single animal survived in the affected herds.

Erlan Nysynbaev, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakhstan stated ?This loss is a huge blow for saiga conservation in Kazakhstan and in the world, given that 90% of the global saiga population is found in our country. It is very painful to witness this mass mortality. We established a working group that includes all relevant experts, including international ones, and are determined to identify the causes and undertake all possible efforts to avoid such events in the future.?
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http://www.cms.int/saiga/en/news/catastrophic-collapse-saiga-antelopes-central-asia

 

[Ronan Kelly]

As Antelope Die-Off Ends, The Mystery Deepens
June 5, 2015

Nearly half the world?s population of the saiga died in just the past few weeks. Now, scientists are digging in to find out why.

By Vicki Croke

The dying may be over but the accounting has just begun.

More than a hundred thousand antelope have perished in one area in just a few weeks and scientists are left with no idea?yet?of what caused it or why it has extinguished itself.

That?s the strange and deadly mystery playing out right now in Kazakhstan among the herds of a critically endangered kind of antelope called the saiga. The herd animals have dropped dead in the thousands?at least 127,000 gone, according to the official estimate, since mid-May.

It seems to have stopped as mysteriously and abruptly as it began, leaving perhaps only half the world?s population (about 250,000 last year) of saiga alive.
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Zuther says the die-off has essentially ended, but the race is on to find the cause. Scientists are on scene, conducting necropsies, or animal autopsies, and analyzing tissue. Though they think two kinds of bacteria (pasteurella and clostridia) have contributed to the deaths, they don?t believe they are the main culprits. That?s because these kinds of bacteria are usually present in healthy saiga as well. Most likely, that means something is affecting the immune system and allowing the bacteria to turn deadly.
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http://thewildlife.wbur.org/2015/06/05/as-antelope-die-off-ends-the-mystery-deepens/

 

[Emily]

[h=1]Mysterious die-off sparks race to save saiga antelope[/h] Half of world population of the endangered saiga dies in weeks ? and nobody is sure why.

• Henry Nicholls

01 June 2015
...
[h=2]Why is the saiga in such trouble?[/h] Towards the end of the nineteenth century, widespread hunting brought the species close to extinction. There was some recovery in the twentieth century, but the end of the Soviet era brought about a dramatic collapse. With rural poverty, a willing market for meat and horns in China and little law enforcement or management, people killed saigas in huge numbers. ?Those three things together caused a 95% decline over a ten-year-period,? says Milner-Gulland.

http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-die-off-sparks-race-to-save-saiga-antelope-1.17675


Bottlenecks and Founder Effects:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIID3Bottlenecks.shtml

 

[Ronan Kelly]

60,000 Antelopes Died in 4 Days ? And No One Knows Why
by Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | September 02, 2015 07:51am ET

It started in late May.

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.
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Tissue samples revealed that toxins, produced by Pasteurella and possibly Clostridia bacteria, caused extensive bleeding in most of the animals' organs. But Pasteurella is found normally in the bodies of ruminants like the saigas, and it usually doesn't cause harm unless the animals have weakened immune systems.

Genetic analysis so far has only deepened the mystery, as the bacteria found were the garden-variety, disease-causing type.

"There is nothing so special about it. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals," Zuther said.
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So far, the only possible environmental cause was that there was a cold, hard winter followed by a wet spring, with lots of lush vegetation and standing water on the ground that could enable bacteria to spread more easily, Zuther said. That by itself doesn't seem so unusual, though, he said.
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http://www.livescience.com/52032-saiga-die-off-mystery.html

 

[Pathfinder]

What's killing the endangered Saiga antelope of Central Asia?
...
November 17, 2015
Adam Wernick
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Dr. Richard Kock, of the Royal Veterinary College in London, who has studied the saiga population, was actually on the scene when this tragic event began to unfold. He says it was unlike anything he has ever witnessed.
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As recently as 2014, the entire saiga population was about 300,000. The central group of about 250,000 is the key population, Kock says. When the die-off began, Kock and his colleagues monitored two additional population sites, one of about 60,000, another of 8,000. Gradually it became clear, however, that there were about 15 different die-off sites.

After the event, the Kazak government agreed to do a census to try to establish the mortality rate. They found that, at most, only 30,000 out of the 250,000 central population survived, Kock says.

But the most surprising thing was that in all of those aggregations, the death rate was 100 percent among animals that got sick. ?I've worked in this field of infectious diseases for 35 years and I have never seen anything like that,? Kock says.

?From an epidemiological perspective, it was too quick to be an infectious disease,? Kock explains.
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After 32 in-depth postmortem examinations, Kock and his colleagues narrowed the cause to a bacteria called Pasteurella multocida, which is associated with a disease called hemorrhagic septocemia.

Pasteurella multocida is a ?commensal parasite,? which means that it can be latent. That is, while not a helpful bacteria, it is typically a neutral bacteria on the skin or in the body of an animal, that lives off of available nutrients. But under certain conditions, the bacteria can become virulent, Kock says, invading the body and causing a disease that leads to bleeding in the internal organs. The question is, what set the bacteria off among the saiga?
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http://www.wbez.org/news/whats-killing-endangered-saiga-antelope-central-asia-113824