Strange Weather Triggered Bacteria That Killed 200,000 Endangered Antelope.
Over the span of three weeks in 2015, more than 200,000 saiga antelope suddenly died in central Kazakhstan.
Scientists knew that bacteria called Pasteurella multocida type B caused the mass death. Now, new research suggests that the bacteria was already present in the animals; it was triggered and became harmful because of a period of unusual weather.
Richard Kock, a professor of Wildlife Health and Emerging Diseases at The Royal Veterinary College, witnessed the "rapidly accelerating death."
"You went from one or two animals to within three or four days — thousands. And then they were all dead by the seventh day," Kock tells NPR. "The animals were showing normal behavior, normal signs, normal grazing and then suddenly they'd start looking a little bit unhappy and stop feeding. Within about three hours they were dead."
This happened across a landscape of several hundreds of kilometers. Kock says the animals showed clear signs of a form of blood poisoning called hemorrhagic septicemia, caused by the bacteria initially found in the tonsils. The bacteria "very rapidly goes within the bloodstream," causing hemorrhaging, he says.
"It's so toxic and so devastating that the animal doesn't show a lot of pathology actually, other than the hemorrhage and rapid death."
But the bacteria alone were not enough to explain the mass fatalities, which only 30,000 of the area's critically endangered saigas survived.
Full article at:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/17/578610222/strange-weather-triggered-bacteria-that-killed-200-000-endangered-antelope?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180118
