Saiga antelope

Saigas eat plants.

They eat grasses and other small plants that grow on the dry plains. They walk a long way to find fresh food.

Saigas are herbivores, which means they eat only plants. They graze on many kinds of grasses and other low-growing plants of the dry plains, and they even eat lichens.

Animal Diversity Web says saigas eat more than one hundred kinds of plants, including grasses, saltworts and sagebrush. Many herds travel long distances between their summer and winter feeding grounds, up to about 1,000 kilometers in a year.

Saigas are grazers recorded feeding on a wide range of grasses and herbaceous plants (IUCN); Animal Diversity Web notes more than one hundred plant species in the diet, including grasses, saltworts and sagebrush.

Most populations are migratory, with widely separated northern summer ranges and southern winter ranges. The Convention on Migratory Species notes that their journeys follow a north-south direction but have a nomadic pattern, change with weather and forage, and can add up to about 1,000 kilometers a year.

Saigas live in big groups called herds.

Sometimes thousands of saigas walk together. They travel across the plains to find food.

Saigas live in herds, usually from a few to thousands of animals. Wolves are their main natural enemy.

Many herds migrate: they spend summer in the north and winter in the south. In spring the females travel together to special places to have their calves. In summer the herds split into smaller groups, and in autumn they come together again for the journey to their winter home.

Saigas are nomadic and gregarious, usually in herds of up to thousands (IUCN). The CMS describes an annual rhythm: females gather in large herds in spring to migrate to calving grounds, herds break up into smaller groups in summer, and they regroup in autumn to move to winter ranges.

Not every population migrates: the Mongolian subspecies does not, the North-West Caspian population no longer does, and the Ural population makes only limited seasonal movements. Wolves are the main natural predator (Animal Diversity Web). Fences along borders have reduced how far the Ustyurt herds can travel.

Long ago, people hunted too many saigas.

Then people worked hard to protect them. Now there are lots of saigas again!

Saigas have had a bumpy history. In the 1990s hunting for their horns and meat made their numbers crash, and they were listed as Critically Endangered in 2002.

Then countries, scientists and local people worked together to protect them, for example by stopping poachers. It worked! By 2022 there were about 1.3 million saigas in Kazakhstan alone. They are still listed as Near Threatened, because harsh winters, droughts and poaching can make their numbers fall again.

After a collapse in the 1990s, driven by poaching for horns and meat as protection weakened, numbers in Kazakhstan fell to about 21,000 in 2003 and the species was assessed as Critically Endangered in 2002. Protection then let populations grow: Kazakhstan, which holds over 98 percent of all saigas, counted about 1,320,000 in May 2022, with roughly 20,000 more in Russia and Mongolia.

Disease remains a major risk. In May 2015 an outbreak of haemorrhagic septicaemia, possibly caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida and believed to be triggered by unusually high humidity and temperature, killed over 200,000 saigas, around 80 percent of one Kazakhstan population, within three weeks (IUCN). The population recovered within a few years. Because another outbreak, severe winters (dzhut) or renewed poaching could cut numbers sharply, the 2023 IUCN assessment lists the species as Near Threatened.