I didn’t drink enough coffee this morning to prepare me for the visual of this animal, or the unsettling stories of this planet’s collective attempts to kill them off.
Today’s Moment of Science… Saiga the dick-nosed antelope.
With a population that once stretched from the British Isles through northern Canada during the last Ice Age, it’s been a rough dozen millenia or so for proboscis bambi. Now largely confined just to a few pockets of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia, the saiga antelope’s population has been slowly gutted by a number of threats. This includes the changing climate, bacterial infections, and just for shits and giggles, horrifically misguided conservationists.
Approximately 2-3 feet tall at the shoulder and weighing 60-160lbs, these pack animals have adapted to life in grasslands and semi-deserts. Though 30-40 antelope form a typical herd, up to a thousand of those interesting faces come together in the spring for all the pregnant saigas to give birth together. Which I imagine to be noisy.
The snoot on the saiga antelope looks decidedly… uncircumcised.
Their facial phallus is a multitool. Believed in ancient times to be used for drinking, we now know it’s a built-in face mask to filter out dust in the summer. Taintface Seabiscuit’s other schnozical benefit is warming the frigid winter air in the desert before it hits their lungs.
So let’s talk about the “save a rhino shoot a saiga” campaign.
There was a smidge of a rhino poaching issue back in the day when there were, uh, rhinos. A ridiculous and unproven belief in Traditional Chinese Medicine that their horns had medicinal properties turned them into a hot commodity on the black market. Well, just the rhino horns. The rest of the rhino didn’t fare so well. When some species were merely almost extinct in the wild, a “wtf do something anything” operation to stop all the fucking rhino killings was in order.
Enter the World Wildlife Fund with the only bad suggestion possible here.
Now, they’ll deny it and say things like “it wasn’t us, it was just a guy who did a fuckload of consulting for us” and “our name isn’t technically on the report that says to kill the saigas, so we’re cool, right?”
However, a 1990 study that lists them as a sponsoring organization states “All nations in which rhino products are consumed should actively promote the substitution of alternative animal products such as water buffalo or saiga horn.” Which was an interesting choice of words if what they meant was “don’t kill animals for their horns.” Their “consultant” was Dr. Esmond Bradley-Martin. He went down in history as a famed conservationist for his work exposing the illegal ivory trade. He said “I supported the use of saiga antelope horn as a substitute for rhino horn from the early 1980s. In my opinion it was the correct policy at the time.”
However, in 1995, he had a come-to-Jesus moment and realized “whoops, killing the animals means there’s less of them alive.” He decided he’d given no good really bad advice over a decade too late.
Also around that time the Soviet Union fell. Which you wouldn’t think has shit to do with the antelope population, but in Soviet Russia, Union collapses you! It’s likely that some hunting for meat increased when resources were scarce, but nobody in a failed state was going to stop you from collecting bags full of dead animal parts.
Estimates vary but generally suggest 97% of the saiga population was killed during this time.
It’s an oddly resilient species though. The population bounced back by quite a bit only to be knocked down again. In recent years researchers have been studying a mass die-off in 2015. In just a matter of weeks, hundreds of thousands of animals died, suddenly and without apparent warning. A film crew from the show Planet Earth II happened to be present and filming at the calving grounds, and were devastated having witnessed most of the fatalities in just three days. One of the show’s producers thought they’d witnessed the beginning of an extinction event for the species. It’s estimated that 200,000 saigas died, leaving just 40,000 alive.
Eventually it was determined that the cause was a bacteria that naturally lives in their snoot, Pasteurella multocida. At the time they had experienced unusually warm, wet weather. Though the mechanism isn’t exactly clear, it seemingly messed with the climate in their noses just enough to enable an overgrowth of this bacteria through their bloodstream. This caused hemorrhagic septicemia, which was fatal for virtually every infected animal.
But this bonerbeak was like NOT TODAY MOTHERFUCKER.
There’s already been a rapid regrowth of the population. Quoting an understatement from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, saiga “populations experience extreme fluctuations.” Six years after hundreds of thousands died out en masse, as of a study from April 2021, the population in Kazakhstan alone was 842,000. The secret is their reproduction schedule. Females can start making new saigas a year off the production line, they live about a decade, generally have one litter per year, and the majority of their litters are twins.
They’ll be ready for the next large-scale civilization collapse anytime now.
This has been your Moment of Science, begging that this critter be renamed the cock-a-doodle-doe.
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