Luke 21:7 “Teacher,” they asked, “when will all this happen? What sign will show us that these things are about to take place?” Luke 21:11 "There will be great earthquakes, and there will be famines and epidemics in many lands, and there will be terrifying things (that which strikes terror), and great miraculous signs in the heavens."
Biologists are stymied by the deaths of 60,000 antelope in four days and over 257,000 total in the Kazakhstan area.
The total number of dead saigas, a steppe-dwelling antelope, was one third of the critically endangered animal’s total population.
“But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed,” geoecologist Steffen Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science.
“The extent of this die-off, and the speed it had, by spreading throughout the whole calving herd and killing all the animals, this has not been observed for any other species,” Zuther said. “It’s really unheard of.”
Necropsies on the animals have just deepened the mystery. Tissue samples revealed toxins and bacteria that caused extensive internal bleeding. However, the bacteria in the bodies were normally in the animals, and it usually doesn’t cause harm unless the animal already had a weakened immune system.
The study also showed all the bacteria present were the basic “garden variety” bacteria.
“There is nothing so special about it. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals,” Zuther said.
A similar die-off happened in Russia in 1988 but the Russian scientists listed the common bacteria as the cause without further research.
