Jonathan Lambert

why their decline could lead to more human disease, and how conservation could help.

The answer lies in the fact that vultures are really, really good at cleaning up dead bodies.

Like they can pick a cow carcass clean in under 40 minutes.

Yeah, and rotting flesh is host to all sorts of bacteria, many of which can cause human diseases.

They're super well adapted to eating dead meat.

One fun fact, their stomach is like 10 times more acidic than ours.

Yeah, yeah.

I spoke to Anant Sudarshan, an environmental economist at the University of Warwick who studied the fallout of this mass die-off.

Here's what he had to say.

As a result, waterborne pathogens like coliform bacteria can become a bigger problem.

Anant and his colleagues analyzed mortality data from the country and found it ticked up 4% because vultures disappeared.

That's a lot and translates to about 100,000 additional deaths a year.

Yeah, and their absence had another crucial effect.

All that extra meat ended up becoming food for feral dogs, which spiked in number.

Here's Chinmay Sonawane, a biology grad student at Stanford.

Yeah, and to Chinmay, the story of these vultures really exemplifies the huge but often hidden benefits that scavengers provide.

For sure.

Chinmay told me there's been a burst of studies looking at the relationship between human health and scavengers in the past few years.

So one study estimates that hyenas scarfing up cattle carcasses outside of one of the largest cities in Ethiopia prevents five cases of anthrax and bovine tuberculosis each year.

Yeah, yeah.