The saiga tatarica can claim something no other large mammal can: it walked alongside woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and watched them disappear.
Today it is still here, moving across the steppes and semi-deserts of Central Asia with the same bulbous nose that helped it survive the Ice Age.
Its recent history, however, reads like both a tragedy and a marvel: in 2015, it came within hours of an irreversible catastrophe, and eleven years later, its population numbers in the millions.
A Nose That’s Really a Time Machine
The first thing anyone notices about the saiga is its fleshy, drooping proboscis — soft and pendulous, hanging over its muzzle as though nature gave it more nose than it needed.
Nature gave it exactly what it needed. Inside those nasal cavities are structures that filter the dust kicked up by herds galloping across arid terrain, warm the frozen winter air before it reaches the lungs, and cool it during the scorching summers of the steppe.
It’s a solution that evolution refined over hundreds of thousands of years, and it works today exactly as it did when the saiga shared its landscape with woolly mammoths.
That design partly explains how the saiga managed something almost no other large herbivore of its era did: it survived into the present.
As the climate shifted dramatically at the end of the Pleistocene, wiping out most of the megafauna, the saiga adapted again and again.
Where It Lives Today
The vast majority of the world’s saigas live in Kazakhstan, which today holds more than 98% of the global population, distributed across three major groups: Ural, Betpak-Dala and Ustyurt.
The rest are scattered across far smaller populations in Russia (the Kalmykia region), Uzbekistan and Mongolia, where a distinct subspecies, the Mongolian saiga, lives separated from the rest by the Altai mountain range.
Turkmenistan still appears on the species’ range maps, but only as an occasional wintering ground for part of the Ustyurt population. Scientists have not recorded a stable saiga presence in the country for several years.
Three Weeks That Could Have Been the End
In May 2015, something began killing saigas in central Kazakhstan at a speed no one could explain.
Entire herds of tens of thousands of healthy animals would grow listless, stop eating and die within hours.
In barely three weeks, more than 200,000 saigas died across a territory roughly the size of the British Isles — around 62% of the entire global population, and more than 80% of the local one.
The immediate cause was hemorrhagic septicemia triggered by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida type B, a microorganism that normally lives harmlessly in the saiga’s tonsils.
What researchers at the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College spent years reconstructing was why that bacterium suddenly turned lethal.
An unusual spike in humidity and temperature in the ten days before the outbreak had apparently thrown the animals’ physiology off balance enough for the bacterium to cross from the tonsils into the bloodstream.
Only around 30,000 saigas survived in the affected region.
From Near-Extinction to a Problem of a Different Kind
What followed is one of the most remarkable wildlife recovery stories on record.
In 2005, even before the 2015 die-off, the saiga population in Kazakhstan had fallen to barely 48,000 animals — the result of two decades of unchecked poaching after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A national hunting ban, stepped-up anti-poaching patrols and years of sustained monitoring reversed that trajectory so decisively that in December 2023, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified the species from critically endangered to near threatened — an improvement rarely seen for a protected species.
The numbers kept climbing after that reclassification: by 2025, Kazakhstan’s saiga population stood at around 4.1 million, and the spring 2026 aerial census placed it at 4.6 million, with projections suggesting nearly 5 million after this year’s calving season.
The growth has been so rapid that it’s now created an unexpected problem.
Farmers across several regions are reporting crop damage from passing herds, and the Kazakh government has spent months debating how to manage a population that multiplied a hundredfold in two decades — including a plan to relocate 1,500 animals to China to help reestablish the species beyond its current range.
A Warning That Has Not Gone Away
For the scientists who study it, the very speed of the recovery is a reason for caution rather than comfort.
The saiga remains a species capable of losing more than 60% of its population in three weeks if the wrong weather conditions align, and that risk does not diminish simply because there are more animals.
What has changed is that, for the first time in twenty years, the species has enough of a buffer to absorb a blow like that without being pushed to the edge of extinction.
