The lost underground cities of Mongolia's steppes
Plus: A long-lost fish reappears, and I dodge spotty WiFi to report from Chinggis
Hello from the steppe! I’m writing this from the small city of Chinggis, the Mongolian spelling of Genghis, as in Genghis Khan. Memorials to the ancient warlord are everywhere in this part of the country, from the giant new statue you pass leaving Ulaanbaatar to a half-finished museum plopped out on the plains.
It’s said he was born and is buried somewhere near the town, which led to its recent renaming. While I’m here to search for manuls, I’ll keep an eye out for the tomb. So far, both have proved equally elusive — I’m told it’ll much easier to spot manuls when we go a bit further north, where there’s more persistent snow on their ground and you can follow their tracks.
A quick programming note — starting soon, the Wednesday edition of FUZZ will have a paywall. Trips like this show me a hard truth about conservation: the future of entire species can hinge on relatively small amounts of funding, which scientists must somehow raise while doing their actual job of saving animals. I want our newsletter community to make a difference toward filling that funding gap.
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The first newsletter in our little FUZZ network also launched today — be sure to check out Pazi’s Pallas. This week, you can learn about the range the manul covers here in Mongolia or meet Pazi, the cat that started it all.
Now onto the steppe…
The hidden architect of Mongolia's steppes
While we’re on our 2600 KM loop across Mongolia this week, I keep scanning for traces of another creature — one that quite literally shapes this landscape from the ground up. But I won't find any Mongolian marmots (tarbagan to locals) on this trip. They're all sleeping soundly in their burrows, waiting out winter in a deep hibernation that won't end until spring.
And even when they do emerge, there will be far fewer than there once were. According to scientist Vadim Kirilyuk, who's been studying the steppe for decades and my companion on this trip, marmot populations have crashed to just 1/1000th of their numbers from a century ago. In the late 1800s, over 1.2 million marmot pelts were traded annually from Mongolia. By the Soviet era, government-imposed harvest quotas pushed that number even higher — to over 2 million marmots shot each year. The pelts, prized in China and Russia, created an unsustainable commercial hunting pressure that the species has never recovered from.
A single marmot colony can create a sprawling underground city with over 90 entrances, their burrows providing essential shelter for many of the steppe residents. Those same burrows are favored denning sites for manuls, giving them safe spaces to raise their kittens away from the brutal -40°F temperatures the steppe can experience. The relationship goes deeper - marmots are also an important prey species for manuls, especially in spring when the cats are feeding their young.
Their decline ripples through the entire ecosystem - fewer burrows mean fewer shelters for manuls and other species, while the loss of their constant digging and grazing alters vegetation patterns across the steppe. It's a stark reminder that ecosystems are built on complicated and often nonobvious relationships — the loss of even one species can trigger a cascade of changes that affects everything from predators to plants.
Conservationists like Kirilyuk are now trying to recreate what's been lost. In an experiment we visited on Sunday, he worked with a local nomadic family to build three artificial shelters across the steppe, carefully designed with entrance holes just large enough for a manul but too small for foxes or dogs. While two remained unused, the third showed heavy traffic - with fresh manul scat outside confirming the new occasional tenant. It's a small success story that helps get nomadic families invested in protecting these rare cats. But the fact that we need to build artificial replacements for what marmot burrows once provided freely shows just how much this ecosystem has changed.
In rural Mongolian folklore, the marmot is believed to be more than just an animal — it’s thought to be a spirit being akin to a tiny human. As we talk about the animals trying to make it in this windswept steppe dotted with their now-quiet burrows, it comes up time and again how much their absence affects everything scientists are working to protect.
Quick links! 🔗
Conservation programs in the Congo Basin, home to a third of the world's remaining mountain gorillas, are scrambling after an abrupt freeze in U.S. foreign aid. The pause has already impacted ranger patrols in places like Virunga National Park, which has received over $23 million in U.S. support since 2019. While a federal judge ordered the funding restored on February 13, many programs remain in limbo. Matthew Hansen, whose team helps map Congo Basin forests, told Mongabay: "We just had the plug pulled on us, and we don't have a plan right now."
A fish species many thought extinct has dramatically resurfaced in India's Himalayan region. The Chel snakehead, unseen for over 80 years despite repeated searches, was found alive by researchers last year. It's a good looking fish — iridescent-green scales with chrome-yellow stripes and a neon patch beneath each eye. Three live specimens have now been documented, offering another bit of hope that other "extinct" species might still be out there, hiding in some forest or stream we just haven’t checked yet.
A little bit more from Mongolia…
The semi-feral horses are everywhere out here — I'll tell you more about them in Wednesday's newsletter. It’s a good story. Internet is spotty the further out we go; to write this, I'm ping-ponging between my phone hotspot and hotel WiFi, each giving me about 5 minutes of connection before dropping.
It's quiet, though there are more people than I expected. You'll often find a yurt (called a ger) tucked into the wind-shielded side of any rock formation, with livestock and massive guard dogs ready to rush anyone who approaches. They’re both the ger’s doorbell and the best defense against the wolves that also call the steppe home.
And while I wish I could tell you this landscape is pristine, it isn't. It’s certainly still more untouched than most places in the world, but humans have had their impact here, too. Beyond the missing tarbagan, there's plastic waste and junk left behind by herders, not to mention copious amounts of livestock dung. Overgrazing and an explosion in livestock numbers is one of the steppe's greatest threats — more on that in the week ahead.
For now, I'm loading up the car in Chinggis and headed northeast. Population studies and camera trap work like Vadim's manul research require covering vast distances — a local picture doesn't reveal much about how a species is facing down threats across its entire range. So we'll be driving. A lot. I'll continue to be your eyes and ears in this unique corner of the world from my backseat office for the next 10 days. Stay tuned.