Nature’s Partnerships Might Break in a Warming World

In the spring of 2015, two-thirds of all the world’s saiga antelope dropped dead. Around 200,000 of these quizzical, endangered animals perished without any warning, over a 65,000-square-mile stretch of Mongolia. Now, Eleanor Milner-Gulland from the University of Oxford and her colleagues think they know that normally lives harmlessly in the saiga’s body. In the unusual climate, this microbe turned renegade, invading the saigas’ bodies and causing fatal cases of blood poisoning.