Saiga Woes

Today Science Daily reports on the plight of the saiga. These are amazing animals, which the reporter describes thusly:

Take a deer's body, attach a camel's head and add a Jimmy Durante nose, and you have a saiga -- the odd-ball antelope with the enormous schnoz that lives on the isolated steppes of Central Asia.

These animals have much bigger problems than their oversized noses, however. A recent study tracked their movement patterns with GPS collars, and discovered that their migration routes go through a very narrow bottleneck area, which is extremely vulnerable to human disturbances and has experienced a significant increase in car and motorcycle activity in recent years. Choking off the migration route could be devastating; it would interfere with the animals' yearly feeding and reproductive cycles.

This species is already on the edge: saiga populations have crashed by 95% over the past two decades, due to overhunting and demand for their body parts for use in traditional medicines. It is crucial for their migration corridors to be regulated and managed, or else the remaining populations could face critical food shortages and overall disrupted ecology. Luckily, it appears that the Mongolian government is interested in helping with taking measures to preserve the passageways, hopefully the new study will help to raise public awareness with the local people in addition to bringing the situation to the attention of Mongolian authorities.

(Photo credit: Richard Reading via Science Daily)