Saiga antelope populations have experienced catastrophic mass mortality events driven by a bacterial pathogen activated by climate conditions, requiring international conservation responses.
The scale of suffering in saiga mass mortality events is difficult to comprehend - hundreds of thousands of animals dying within days from bacterial septicemia. Individual saiga experience fever, respiratory distress, and collapse before death. Conservation of saiga habitat and reduction of poaching pressure maintains larger, more resilient baseline populations better able to recover from inevitable mortality events.