If you were to imagine a cross between Bambi and a snuffleupagus, you might come up with something that looks a lot like the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica). With its wide doe eyes and large, twin-pipe breathing apparatus, the honey-colored, goat-sized saiga is one of the most whimsical-looking of the spiral-horned antelopes; it is also one of the most threatened animals on Earth. Currently classified as critically endangered, which is the next to last stop on the harrowing road to extinction, the saiga antelope is at very high risk of vanishing from the wild.

Although saigas have roamed the planet since the era of the woolly mammoth, as far back as 2.6 million years, and were abundant across Eastern Europe, Asia, and Alaska throughout the 19th century, their population plummeted from one million in the 1990s to just 60,000 by 2005. Extinct in China for the last five decades, migratory herds of saiga antelopes can now only be found on the vast grassy plains of the Eurasian steppe in remote areas of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Conservationists working to bring the species back from the brink have faced two major challenges, widespread poaching and climate change-induced vulnerability to viral disease that led to a massive die-off in 2015.

Like an elephant’s tusks and a pangolin’s scales, the translucent amber horns of the male saiga are highly coveted for use in traditional medicine, making the antelope an especially valuable target for poachers. As a consequence of rampant poaching over a fifteen-year period, the reduction in the number of saiga males available for mating in proportion to females led to a significant decrease in the rate of new births, and ultimately, reproductive collapse. Following a decade of strategic conservation efforts and enforcement of anti-poaching legislation, the saiga population had rebounded to 300,000 by late spring of 2015 when hundreds of thousands of females gathered on the steppe of Kazakhstan to give birth. In a widely documented mass mortality event which has now been linked to a rapid increase in temperature and humidity, over a three week period, 200,000 saiga mothers and newborn calves succumbed to a respiratory virus reducing the total population to 103,000, once again leaving the struggling animals teetering on the edge.

And now for some good and hopeful news, because we can always use a bit more of that in general, but especially when it comes to animals on the verge of extinction: saiga conservation groups working in collaboration with the Royal Veterinary College reported in May 2019 that as a result of ongoing anti-poaching work, disease management, and habitat protection the saiga population doubled to approximately 228,000 between 2016 and 2018. And because lowering vulnerability to climate change-related stressors is key to safeguarding endangered species like the saiga, scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum are also exploring whether the antelopes are flexible enough to relocate. If, like their ice-age ancestors, they are able to survive in colder areas outside of their current semi-arid steppe habitat, the risk of another heat-induced viral infection epidemic may be diminished.

Whether racing against the clock to save the saiga, the right whale, or the rhino, researchers, scientists, and NGOs around the world dedicated to the conservation of the 6,127 species listed as critically endangered have their work cut out for them. Rapid and continuing habitat loss, poaching, and environmental degradation, along with newly emerging viral diseases related to climate change make biodiversity conservation an especially complex and challenging problem that requires unique, ground-breaking, and sustainable solutions.

Speaking of conservation solutions, you can learn about some game-changing innovations from the Nature Conservancy and find out what the next generation of MIT scientists are cooking up on the biodiversity front at the Environmental Solutions Initiative. If you are prone to rooting for the underdog, or the under-antelope, as we are at Weekly Wondrous, you can lend your support to the Saiga Conservation Alliance at the Wildlife Conservation Network. And if you’d like to give a conservation scientist a holiday hug of gratitude for helping to protect and preserve the wild and the wondrous, you may do that wherever you happen to find one.