saiga

saiga, (Saiga tatarica), medium-sized hoofed mammal of the family Bovidae (order Artiodactyla) that lives in herds in treeless steppe country. Once common from Poland to western Mongolia, it has been greatly reduced by hunting and habitat destruction and now exists in locations in southwestern Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Since 2002 the saiga has been considered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to be critically endangered.

The most outstanding feature of the saiga is its swollen snout with downward-directed nostrils. The snout serves to warm and moisten inhaled air; it may be related to the animal’s keen sense of smell, and it may also work as a sounding chamber for rutting calls. The adult saiga stands about 76 cm (30 inches) at the shoulder and weighs 31 to 43 kg (68 to 95 pounds). Females are roughly three-quarters the size of males. The saiga’s coat is short and pale brown in summer and thick and whitish in winter. During rut, an adult male attempts to control a group of 5 to 10 females, preventing females from leaving and attacking any intruding male. After a gestation of five months, females give birth to one or two young, which remain crouched and hidden in the grass for four to eight days.

The male saiga bears ridged amber-yellow horns that are somewhat lyre-shaped. These horns are highly valued in Chinese medicine and are the main reason the saiga has been so widely hunted. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, western saigas were killed so indiscriminately for horns, meat, and hides that they were reduced to a few small, scattered populations. The Soviet Union prohibited hunting in 1921, and saigas soon increased and expanded their range. Commercial hunting was resumed in 1951, but state-controlled agencies guarded and sustainably managed the animals, with professional culling teams making a conservative harvest each year. Thus, saiga numbers steadily increased. Population size has recently plummeted again because of overhunting that has followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some poachers are known to drive motorcycles after fleeing groups, bringing down saigas with the help of a steel rope held in tension between the vehicles.

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In 2010 three of the four populations of Saiga tatarica tatarica, the largest and most endangered of the two subspecies of the saiga antelope, suffered separate catastrophes. The hard winter of 2009–10 caused decline in the Pre-Caspian population in Russia, and the Ural population in western Kazakhstan was hit by pasteurellosis, a disease caused by Pasteurella bacteria, in May 2010, during which roughly 12,000 animals died within a few days. The Ustyurt population shared between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also declined 47 percent between 2009 and 2010 owing to poaching. In May 2015 more than 120,000 saiga died in Kazakhstan from what may have been a sudden outbreak of pasteurellosis.