3 ms·
Regardless of the actual cause of this mass-dying, what steps (if any) are being taken to secure the species? Are any saigas being kept in quarantine anywhere?
by veddox 11y ago
Regardless of the actual cause of this mass-dying, what steps (if any) are being taken to secure the species? Are any saigas being kept in quarantine anywhere?
If one third of the total population can be wiped out within two weeks without prior notice, it would make sense to me to keep a small subpopulation in safety somewhere else.
- pvaldes 11y agoSaiga is a little like the tasman tiger in that almost all zoos had some in the last 60 years but lost its animals gradually. Is a gregarious animal that needs a lot of space to be itself and is very fragile also, living short lives in zoos (less than 5 years). In the reproductive season males seem prone to forget all except sex, stop to eat and die easily (bassically sacrifice itselves for giving a better survival probability to pregnant females). Females have only one or very few babies in its entire live when in zoos. ISIS (the International Species Information System) is a software/database used to trace all rare animals captive in zoos all around the world. http://www2.isis.org/ http://www2.isis.org/ After ISIS this species could be very rare in zoos currently with an entire world zoo population of maybe 2-4 specimens only: A couple of females in Moscow at least. Dallas, Cologne, Seoul, New Jersey, Beijing, Berlin and San Diego had saigas in the past but it seems that no one survived until today. The species does much better in semi-captive environments. At least a place in Ukraine (and maybe other in Roskow and Palmyra) have small herds of 50-250 animals running free in big enclosures. The problem is that we know that those herds can be entirely wipped in the blink of an eye. Illegal poachers also killed in 2014 the equivalent to many times the entire captive world population.