What If Gone

Species → Saiga Antelope

Saiga Antelope

Saiga tatarica

4,100,000 individuals (Kazakhstan, 2025)
Extinction risk Near Threatened
Catastrophic declineConservationHuman-wildlife conflict
Saiga Antelope (Saiga tatarica)
Photo: Andrey Giljov, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact High
Over 18 years

Despite a mass-mortality episode in 2015 that killed more than two-thirds of the world population at the time (see the next point), the population was reclassified in December 2023 from 'critically endangered' to 'near threatened' by the IUCN — a recovery from 48,000 individuals in 2005 to about 1.9 million in 2023, driven by a nationwide hunting ban and stepped-up monitoring.

Documented
Detail

UICN, Liste rouge — Saiga tatarica, réévaluation de décembre 2023.

The IUCN calls this category change an 'unprecedented conservation triumph' — a direct two-category jump, as rare in the direction of recovery as it usually is in the direction of decline. The smaller populations in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia are also growing, but remain tens of times smaller than Kazakhstan's.

Mass-mortality episode, Kazakhstan

In three weeks, about 200,000 saigas died — more than two-thirds of the world population at the time, and 88% of the Betpak-Dala population alone — from hemorrhagic septicemia triggered by an unusual spell of heat and humidity that caused a previously harmless bacterium to proliferate.

Documented
Detail

Kock, R.A. et al. (2018). Saigas on the brink: Multidisciplinary analysis of the factors influencing mass mortality events. Science Advances, 4(1), eaao2314.

The pathogen, Pasteurella multocida serotype B, is normally present harmlessly in the saiga's respiratory tract; the authors show that specific weather conditions — abnormally high air temperature and humidity over the ten days preceding the event — allowed it to proliferate to a lethal threshold. Within affected herds, the mortality rate reached 100%.

Today, Kazakhstan

The recovery has been so rapid that Kazakhstan is now debating regulated use of the species rather than protection alone — high saiga densities are increasingly conflicting with agriculture and grazing land in the west of the country.

Extrapolated
Detail

The Astana Times (avril 2025). Kazakhstan's Saiga Population Reaches 4.1 Million as Debate Grows Over Regulation Measures.

The population reached 4.1 million individuals in 2025, split between the Ural (2.3 million), Betpak-Dala (1.6 million), and Ustyurt (92,200) populations — more than 98% of the world population is now found in Kazakhstan. The debate pits experts favoring sustainable harvest against local officials who prefer non-lethal regulation methods — a management problem that is the inverse of the one documented in nearly every other entry in this reference collection.

What's missing to confirm it: A quantified assessment of the actual scale of agricultural damage attributed to the saiga, rather than only a qualitative description of growing conflict with grazing and crops.

Not measured to date

The saiga is a large grazer of the Central Asian steppe, but no study measures what its near-collapse in 2015 or its spectacular recovery since have changed for the steppe vegetation itself — available literature covers the species' demographics, not its grazing role in the ecosystem.

Insufficient

Documentation

Last verified: August 14, 2026