Colorado Parks and Wildlife asks you not to be alarmed if you see paint-dotted mountain goats on Mount Evans.

Though, there’s concern behind the marks.

Wildlife officials have tagged the wooly animals seen along the road to the 14,000-foot summit as part of research into an unknown disease, according to a news release.

In 2013 and 2019, young goats were found to be suffering from “severe diarrhea,” the release said, “and almost the entire age class of kids were lost those two years due to this unknown disease.”

Last year, scientists launched a study to identify the cause. This includes collecting feces to compare with later samples.

“Right now we are collecting some baseline information, so we are marking these goats with paintballs,” one of those scientists, Lance Carpenter, said in the release.

“The paintballs that we hit them with don’t hurt the goats, but we individually mark each animal that we are tracking and we want to track these animals over time. The hope is to get some baseline information of what their feces contains — the bacteria, the viruses or if there are parasites — to help us understand what is going on.”

Carpenter said “high loads” of E. coli have been detected so far — “interesting,” he said, but not yet known to be the culprit of the disease.

A survey last year suggested there are 80 to 90 mountain goats living on Mount Evans.