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Russian language animated cartoon with English subtitles about the saiga antelope.
English language video for Club Penguin by Disney Canada featuring the saiga antelope.
English language video about the saiga antelope on the steppe.
Russian language video about the saiga antelope.
English language video by Bill and Rahima Fitz about the saiga antelope.
Saiga have faced the long term threat of climate change and now the more immediate danger of human persecution and habitat degradation. In less than two decades, numbers have dropped 95% from 1,000,000 to 50,000.
The current but untested hypothesis is that a combination of unusual weather, topography and pasture improvement resulted in fast-growing, moist and atypically composed forage, which caused a form of metabolite toxicosis. An analysis of assumptions underlying this hypothesis using meteorological data and satellite imagery revealed that neither temporal variation in weather nor highly-productive, moist forage are likely to have been factors in the die-offs; although significantly lower vegetation or soil moisture in die-off zones than in the surrounding landscape indicates events were location-dependent, and therefore precipitated by changes in calving site selection driven by human…