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Five years before the novel coronavirus ran rampant around the world, saiga antelopes from the steppes of Eurasia experienced their own epidemic.

Millions of these grazing animals鈥攅asily recognizable by their oversized snouts鈥攐nce migrated across what is today Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Georgia and more.听

But then, over the span of three weeks in 2015, nearly 200,000, or two-thirds of their existing population, sickened and died from a bacterial infection. Today, a little more than 100,000 saiga are hanging onto survival in a few pockets of Eurasia.听

The decline, and uncertain fate, of the saiga is a story that resonates with Joanna Lambert. She鈥檚 a conservation biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a coauthor of a paper . The study explores the current state of ungulates, or hoofed animals like the saiga, in the western U.S. and around the world.听

Lambert, who has studied ecological communities in both North America and Equatorial Africa, explained that many of these creatures aren鈥檛 well-known outside of their home regions. But when these animals disappear, entire ecosystems can reshuffle, occasionally beyond recognition. 听听

鈥淲e鈥檙e losing these animals without people ever knowing they were there in the first place,鈥� said Lambert, a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at CU Boulder.听

For the researcher, the study鈥檚 publication marks an opportunity to reflect on how she stays hopeful even amid tremendous losses鈥攁nd how to talk about the natural world during a period of unprecedented social upheaval.听

鈥淚 tell my students, 鈥業 have to give you the facts. This is the world you鈥檙e growing up in, but don鈥檛 let that paralyze you,鈥欌�� Lambert said.

Unsung species

The new research was led by Joel Berger of Colorado State University and also included scientists from Bhutan, Argentina and Chile.

The team decided to look at ungulates because鈥攚ith a few exceptions like rhinos and elephants鈥攖hey don鈥檛 usually pop up in brochures for conservation organizations. But, Lambart said, they鈥檙e still in trouble: Huemel, for example, once roamed across the Patagonia region of South America. Today, 1,500 or fewer of these fluffy deer still live in the wild. The tamaraw, a pint-sized buffalo from the Philippines, is down to just a few hundred individuals.听

鈥淭he whole world knows the stories of pandas and mountain gorillas, but there are untold numbers of unsung species that come and go without the world鈥檚 attention,鈥� she said.听

Their cases also show just how complicated conservation can be.听

Lambert has spent years trekking the grasslands and forests of Yellowstone National Park to study wildlife. After federal officials killed all the park鈥檚 wolves in the 1940s, elk herds there began to multiply鈥攂ig time. Head counts for these herbivores surged from a few thousand individuals to tens of thousands, and they devoured once-abundant plants like cottonwood and willow trees.听

鈥淲hen you pull one species out of its community, or if you add a new one in, the entire assembly changes,鈥� Lambert said. 鈥淭hat has been the history of what humans have done on the planet.鈥�

When the park brought wolves back in the 1990s, and elk numbers dropped back down, something unexpected happened: beavers, which had also disappeared from Yellowstone, began reappearing, too. The furry swimmers, it turns out, depend on those same tree species to build their dams.听

鈥淚n many cases, we don鈥檛 know what rules these ecosystems followed in the past,鈥� she said. 鈥淓ven when we do know, it doesn鈥檛 matter because we now have this added element of human tinkering.鈥�

Ecological grief

Lambert has also struggled to keep going as a conservation biologist as the wilds around her field sites in Africa and North America dwindled, then vanished entirely.

鈥淎s I returned each year from the field, it was taking me longer and longer to recover from a sort of existential depression,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 realized that I have been profoundly impacted by the losses I鈥檝e seen.鈥�

Many of Lambert鈥檚 students feel similarly hopeless, a phenomenon that psychologists call 鈥渆cological grief.鈥� She tells them to focus on the success stories, however rare they are. Protected areas like Yellowstone have saved countless animals from extinction and have given others like wolves new chances at survival. Lambert is also providing scientific guidance around proposals to return wolves to Colorado.

听And there are still a lot of animals out there鈥攊ncluding the few remaining herds of big-nosed saiga.听

鈥淲e need to fight like hell to keep all that,鈥� she said