Saiga antelopes have rebounded after being hunted to the brink of extinction less than two decades ago and sustaining huge losses to disease in 2015. An estimated 1.3 million saiga now roam the vast steppe grasslands of Kazakhstan, a 30-fold increase from their population of less than 40,000 in 2005.
Millions of these antelopes (Saiga tatarica) once grazed alongside woolly mammoths and steppe bison throughout the Eurasian grasslands. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to widespread unchecked poaching of the goat-sized animals for meat and horns, and the population dwindled to tens of thousands.
Saiga antelopes have increased 10-fold after mass die-off in 2015