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Great Migrations Deserve Protection, Say Experts

Jessica Marshall, Discovery News

Diminished migrations might not drive a species to extinction, but that doesn't mean everything is well, she said. "People can get kind of comfortable at how many caribou there are. If they lose one corridor, they might be OK for several years, but it might just take one bad winter or a drought."

Young is part of a project to study the migration of the Mongolian saiga, a goat-sized antelope with a distinctive nose bump. The saiga's numbers have dropped 95 percent in less than 20 years, primarily because of hunting, now outlawed.

Working with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Young's team tagged five female saiga and tracked their whereabouts every five hours for a year.

Their tracking identified critical bottlenecks in the migration paths of the saiga, where mountains or other features limit the paths the saiga can take. One of these bottlenecks is only about three miles wide. Such areas are critical targets for maintaining migration routes, because if the bottlenecks are cut off by human development, the saiga have no alternative path.

Young said local governments in Mongolia are eager to find ways to protect the saiga, and are working to find compromises that will maintain these routes.

Migratory bottlenecks are crucial spots to protect, but at least they provide a focused target for conservation. For more dispersed routes, like those used by songbirds, sustaining routes may be more difficult. "You really have to protect pockets of habitat all the way from the breeding grounds to the wintering grounds," Wilcove said.

"If we are able to protect the great migrations that exist, it will be because we've set up a network of protected areas and we have learned to use the land and waters in sustainable ways across all sorts of international boundaries," he said. "And that will essentially mean that we have gone a long way toward protecting all of Earth's biodiversity."

How Stuff Works: Animal Migrations

David Wilcove's book, "No Way Home: The Decline of the World's Great Animal Migrations"

Planet Green

Discovery Earth Live