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This past Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to list the Gunnison sage grouse as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The decision stirred the usual, um, grousing from camps both in support and opposition to federal protection for the small bird. The total count of just 5,000 birds is mostly centered in Gunnison County, Colorado, and six smaller satellite populations are hanging on in other areas.
Environmentalists, including two groups that have forced Fish and Wildlife listing decisions on more than 250 species, felt the announcement didn't go far enough. A "threatened" listing carries fewer habitat protections and development restrictions than an "endangered" one, which was originally proposed in January 2013. (Talks of listing the Gunnison grouse date back even further; I covered the agency's decision not to list the species in 2006.) That leaves the door open for continued oil and gas development and grazing and more residential growth in the bird's historic range. Braun, who has waited years for this moment, shared the disappointment and calls the threatened determination "a sham." He will likely join with WildEarth Guardians in suing the government for downgrading the listing.
Meanwhile, ranchers, local governments, and the energy industry complained that the decision to list the grouse ignored voluntary agreements to protect sagebrush habitat. Voluntary agreements to remove juniper and restore sagebrush or alter grazing plans cover nearly 400,000 public acres in the Gunnison Basin and another 94,000 acres of private lands across western Colorado. Terry Fankhauser of the Colorado Cattleman's Association said the listing will now "chill" voluntary support – which is exactly why environmentalists question the value of such actions that can be halted at any time. Fish and Wildlife director Dan Ashe said the decision to list this time, despite the voluntary pledges, doesn't mean other looming cases, such as that of the West-wide Greater sage grouse, will go the same way.
Under the listing, the Fish and Wildlife Service will designate 1.4 million acres as "critical habitat" for the grouse, which is still a fraction of the species' historic range. But in previous comments to the agency, the Western Energy Alliance and other industry groups said that almost half of the designated area is vacant or only potential grouse territory, so shouldn't include any drilling restrictions. Backing up those concerns, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has also threatened to sue the feds for listing the bird at all.
How federal protection for the Gunnison sage grouse will impact oil and gas development isn't clear. Terry Riley, conservation policy director for the nonprofit Grouse Partnership, says industry has been coy in disclosing how prime oil and gas resources overlap with critical habitat. Dropping oil prices could slow development – and conflicts between drill rigs and grouse – even if the ESA doesn't. But, he adds, it will be difficult to revoke or suspend drilling leases that have already been issued.
"The thing we have to do is stop the bleeding – any more habitat fragmentation or sagebrush conversion has to be stopped until we get populations back up to a restoration goal," Riley says. "Until we do that, any oil and gas development or houses built in habitat is going to contribute to the decline."
With lawsuits on the horizon, the fate of the Gunnison sage grouse is far from settled. Braun, who continues to publish research on the species, fears a more existential deadline. He suggests the grouse could face extinction in a few decades, especially if wildfire or disease knocks back the main population in Gunnison. "This might have had some merit 15 years ago," Braun says, of the threatened listing. Now, "it's too little, too late."
Joshua Zaffos is a contributing editor for High Country News. Follow him on Twitter on @jzaffos.]]>
(T)his wolf has been spotted on the Kaibab Plateau, the very place where conservation hero Aldo Leopold worked to exterminate wolves in the 1920s. In his essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain," included in 1949's A Sand County Almanac, he wrote about the role wolves play in controlling deer numbers and thus staving off catastrophic population crashes when giant deer herds eat all the available vegetation. He also recounts shooting at a pack of wolves there (after all, as he writes, "In those days we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf"). He killed one, and, in what is among the most famous passages of the book, he watched "a fierce green fire dying in her eyes." Somehow, at that moment, he understood the ecological role of the wolf. Yet by the time his book came out, there were no more wolves on the Kaibab.
Wolves once roamed the U.S. from sea to shining sea. But on the Kaibab and elsewhere, humans shot and poisoned them into oblivion. In recent decades, reintroduction and conservation efforts in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes have successfully revived gray wolf populations. And now, the carnivores are making inroads into other historic territories on their own, says Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife, who has worked on Northern Rockies wolf conservation for decades. "The wolves from the Northern Rockies used to be connected to the Mexican wolf population," which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently trying to reestablish in Arizona and New Mexico. "So this is a very natural process that was in place for thousands of years. It's exciting to be able to see the potential for (connectivity) happening again."
"Dispersal," or leaving one's pack to find a mate and establish new territory, helps maintain genetic diversity and tends to occur when wolves are in their "teenage years." Thanks to tools like radio and GPS collars and DNA analysis, we're increasingly able to piece together the epic treks canid explorers make into areas we previously vanquished them from. Some journeys attract massive amounts of attention, like that of OR7, the male wolf who, in 2011, became the first wild wolf to enter California in decades. Others go little noticed.
Here at High Country News, we plotted a few notable wolf treks of late on a map, with lines that give a crude sense of the distance they've traveled. The animals, of course, don't follow straight lines from one place to the next; the plots are rough estimates of where they dispersed from and arrived. In the case of the Great Lakes population, which occupies northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, we used just one point to show the general region in which the core population lives. Click on the red markers for more info about specific wolves.
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She tweets @callycarswell.
Thumbnail photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.]]>
1974: The nearly extinct gray wolf was listed as endangered.
1995: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced gray wolves into Idaho and Yellowstone National Park.
May 2011: The now-thriving predator was delisted in Montana, Idaho and parts of Washington, Oregon and Utah, but remained protected in Wyoming because the state lacked a viable management plan ("How the gray wolf lost its endangered status — and how enviros helped," HCN, 6/6/11). After Wyoming revised its plan, that decision was reversed in September 2012. Under the state's plan, wolves could be shot on sight in the "predator zone," which spans nearly 80 percent of Wyoming.
Wyoming's attempt at wolf management is over, at least for now; conservationists challenged the 2012 decision and a U.S. District Court recently affirmed that the delisting was premature and a violation of federal law. Defenders of Wildlife CEO Jamie Rappaport Clark said, "Any state that has a wolf-management plan that allows for unlimited wolf killing should not be allowed to manage wolves." The state's fall wolf-hunting season is now on hold.]]>
And hardly anyone noticed that it happened.
Hardly anyone, that is, outside of conservation biologists, wildlife managers and lawyers. Conservationists have long insisted that the phrase is clear on its face: A species that's in jeopardy in a significant portion of its range — the flat-tailed horned lizard, for instance, in the Sonoran Desert — warrants protection simply on that basis. The inhabitants of that significant portion don't have to be crucial to the global survival of the species; it's enough that they're disappearing from a place where they typically thrived.
Developers and industry representatives, on the other hand, argue the opposite: If you wipe out all the flat-tailed horned lizards in Arizona, but that same lizard nevertheless persists quite heartily in, say, Mexico, then the species should not be listed.
To conservationists' dismay, the Obama administration has now opted for the latter argument. That's no surprise: "We've been operating (with that interpretation) on a case-by-case basis for more than a decade," says U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gavin Shire. "Now we have formalized our criteria in an official definition."
And while the announcement flew under the general public's radar, to conservationists it signals a major shift from the law's manifest intent.
"It's fundamentally at odds with what the Endangered Species Act was written for," says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, in Portland, Oregon. "The law wasn't designed to make sure some specimen of a species in some postage-stamp area was preserved. It was designed to retain species in ecosystems that depend on them."
The agency's interpretation appears to be the same one struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001, in a battle over the aforementioned flat-tailed horned lizard. The lizard had been squeezed out of most of its range in the Sonoran Desert of California and Arizona; it hung on in a few isolated patches and refuges. But U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list it as endangered, so the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife sued. The court didn't totally side with Defenders, which had argued that the projected amount of lost habitat (over 80 percent) compelled the lizard's listing. But neither did it buy then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton's argument that "a species is in danger of extinction in 'a significant portion of its range' only if it is in danger of extinction everywhere." For that to be true, the court said, "significant portion" and "all" would have to mean the same thing. And, of course, they don't.
Shire explains (and the policy document verifies) a key difference between Norton's argument and the current policy. Under Norton, a species that meets the listing criteria — meaning that its loss in a portion of its range puts the entire global population at risk — nonetheless merits protection only where it's already in trouble. Under the current policy, such a species will be defended wherever it roams or grows. But Michael Paul Nelson, a professor and environmental ethicist at Oregon State University, says that's missing the point: Congress included "significant portion of its range" in the 1973 act, he says, so that wildlife managers could get ahead of crises and act before an entire species teetered on the brink of extinction. Two earlier laws, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 and the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, "were deemed inadequate," he says, "in part because they only called for intervention when species were at risk of global extinction." At that point, it was often too late.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dan Ashe has pitched the policy clarification as a resource-saving move. "We're looking at our very limited budgets and limited abilities and asking, 'Where can that money be put to best use?' " Shire explains, adding that species — at least vertebrates — at risk in a limited area can also be listed under the "distinct population segment" amendment to the act in 1978.
But that's an imperfect category, too: Until recently, the Canada lynx in the U.S. was considered "distinct" and protected in just 14 states; if a cat crossed the wrong state boundary, it lost its threatened status. (As of Oct. 14, the animal will be protected "where found.") The northern Sonoran Desert population of the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, a tiny raptor that inhabits Southwestern desert scrub and mesquite woodlands, was listed as an endangered distinct population segment in 1997 — until developers sued and won on the grounds that the bird was doing fine in Mexico.
Noah Greenwald agrees that the pygmy-owl in the northern Sonoran Desert did not qualify as "distinct" from its brethren across the border. But the Center for Biological Diversity insisted that the bird was nonetheless imperiled in a "significant portion of its range." Some agency scientists agreed, but in the end Fish and Wildlife said no. "They said even if (the pygmy-owl) were lost in the Sonoran Desert, the species as a whole would be OK," Greenwald says, an interpretation based more on politics than science.
"The policy itself is a political decision to try and limit the scope of the ESA," Greenwald says. "The pygmy-owl exemplifies that." The organization will likely sue on its behalf.
Nelson, meanwhile, wants the public to realize how far one of the country's landmark environmental laws has strayed from its 1973 intent. The Obama administration, Nelson says, has narrowed "significant" to mean "only preventing the complete extinction of a species, no more." He adds, "I would guess that the citizens of the United States might have a very different answer."]]>
In other words: the Earth has just half as many animals as it did in 1970. I'll give you a minute to let that sink in.
WWF scientists arrived at that tragic conclusion by examining trends in more than 10,000 wildlife populations — including 2,028 populations that live at least partly in the United States, from Acanthogobius flavimanus to Zosterops japonicus. What does the WWF report, called the "Living Planet Index," say about wildlife out here in the American West? We combed through the LPI data portal to see how our region's animals are faring.
A few takeaways:
Our charismatic megafauna is doing well
If there's one thing conservation is good at, it's throwing money at the big-eyed furry critters. And as WWF data (and numerous other studies) reveal, those efforts are largely working: Wolves are flourishing, Yellowstone's grizzlies have recovered enough that they may soon be delisted, and mountain lions have recolonized Hollywood Hills.
Those findings shouldn't surprise followers of Western wildlife news, but they're still striking — especially compared to the tigers, rhinos and elephants that are being poached out of existence in Asia and Africa. Turns out it's easier to keep wildlife alive when you can pay rangers and enforce protected areas.
We need to sweat the small stuff
Anybody seen any lowland leopard frogs lately? Little brownish-green guys, dark markings on their backs, used to be abundant throughout the Southwest? If you haven't spotted any, you're not alone: According to studies cited in the data portal, two distinct populations have plummeted.
The decline of lowland leopards mirrors the national die-off of amphibians: scarcely mourned victims of habitat loss, invasive species, and the spread of the fungal disease Chytrid. It's great that we're devoted to conserving mammals — but we need to invest in amphibian solutions, too.
Short-term gains can obscure longer-term loss
Consider that iconic Western beast, the American bison. On the precipice of extinction just a century ago, bison are now secure within Yellowstone National Park, and their protected status is reflected in their numbers: According to one study in the LPI database, the population of a single herd leapt from just 482 animals in 1984 to 1,460 in 2004.
But incremental improvement doesn't equal recovery — not when you consider that 19th-century trains often idled for hours to allow "living streams" of shaggy beasts to pass. Zoom out to 1970, and you see progress; but zoom out to, say, 1770 and you see disaster. Scientists call these sliding standards "shifting baseline syndrome," the process of ecological forgetting that causes each generation, ignorant of past abundance, to embrace as natural its degraded present. The trick is to celebrate conservation's accomplishments without settling for a new, diminished status quo.
We've exported our damage
When it comes to managing its animals, the U.S. has a lot going for it: Our tough (albeit still imperfect) Endangered Species Act, our scientific resources, our robust civil society. Overall, biodiversity in high-income nations like ours has actually increased by 10 percent.
Yet in taking our conservation strides, we've walked all over the planet. Consider, by way of example, fisheries. According to the WWF report, 37 percent of surveyed wildlife populations are threatened primarily by exploitation — for the most part, that's hunting and fishing. What's America's role? Well, while we've rebuilt fisheries here at home, we also import 91 percent of our seafood — meaning that international fisheries are overexploited to put food in our bellies. "In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion," said Keya Chatterjee, WWF's senior director of footprint, in a press release.
In sum: We may be doing a half-decent job conserving our wildlife domestically, but we're as culpable for global loss as anyone.
Ben Goldfarb is a correspondent at High Country News. Follow @ben_a_goldfarb]]>
Those are the questions the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries' Service, sought to address on June 27, when they announced a new policy to provide "consistency in the application of that phrase" as it applies to endangered or threatened species. Under the new policy, a species on the decline in "a significant portion of its range" can be listed as threatened or endangered only if that portion is crucial to the survival of the species' entire global population.
In other words, if the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl will persist even after the species disappears from, for instance, the northern Sonoran Desert, the bird doesn't warrant protection.
It is not the clarification conservationists wanted. If the interpretation sticks, some say, the 1973 law will have fundamentally changed — reverted, in fact, to the 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act that the 1973 law was written to improve.
"The 1966 law was deemed inadequate in part because scientists pointed out that actions taken only to prevent the complete extinction of a species were likely not to (work)," says Michael Paul Nelson, a professor and environmental ethicist at Oregon State University. "It defined 'endangered species' merely as 'species at risk of extinction.'"
The phrase "significant portion of its range" allowed wildlife agencies to list a species whose numbers were diminishing in the U.S., even if global populations were stable.
In a recent New York Times editorial, Nelson and Michigan Technological University Ecologist John Vucetich argued that the new policy threatens to reduce the act to "a mechanism that merely preserves representatives of a species, like curating rare pieces in a museum."
The bald eagle might never have merited protection were the policy in effect back in the 1970s; while hunting and DDT were decimating it, it still thrived in Alaska and Canada. The gray wolf wouldn't have been listed, either. The new interpretation of those five words has already been used in the process of delisting the wolf and to deny protection to the wolverine. And it has already contributed to the delisting of the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl.
The cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl's disappearance from parts of its northern range toward the end of the 20th century wasn't a mystery: Development had surged in the northern Sonoran Desert. In 1997, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the bird as endangered, developers were livid.
"The bird's listing is 'dishonest,'" Alan Lurie, executive director of the Southern Arizona Homebuilders' Association, told Tony Davis, who reported on it for this magazine. "Experts tell me the bird is prolific in Mexico (so) it is not truly endangered."
Lurie was partially right: The pygmy-owl was first listed on the grounds that it was a "distinct population segment" from the pygmy-owls on the Mexican side of the border, which it technically wasn't. Developers sued, and in 2006 the pygmy-owl's listing was overturned.
And yet the owl was clearly endangered in the northern Sonoran Desert. So the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned again for the bird's protection, arguing this time that it was "in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range."
At first Fish and Wildlife agreed. "They actually drafted a proposed rule to list them, arguing for various reasons that we were right," says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the organization in Portland, Oregon. In that draft, which the Center for Biological Diversity obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, "the Sonoran Desert Ecoregion" was deemed "significant," and the listing of the pygmy-owl within it was warranted.
Then something changed. "Two years later, they looked at that draft policy and said 'Nope, you're not right. Even if (the pygmy-owl) were lost in the Sonoran Desert, the species as a whole would be okay.'" A new draft in 2011 claimed that the Sonoran Desert pygmy-owl's "contribution to the viability of the species" wasn't important enough to list it. The petition was denied.
It was the exact — and to Greenwald and Nelson, deeply flawed — interpretation Interior had been pushing for since 2000; the exact interpretation that had already been struck down by the Ninth Circuit in a case involving the flat-tailed horned lizard in 2001.
And it was the exact interpretation many conservationists were hoping the Obama administration would overturn, not support, in its clarification. "The policy itself is a political decision to try and limit the scope of the ESA," Greenwald says. His organization will likely sue again, on behalf of the pygmy-owl.
Michael Paul Nelson says the new policy also misses the point. "Many of us would suggest that the ESA is not only about preserving curiosities and the cabinets necessary for those curiosities, but about preserving the role that native species play within ecosystems," he wrote in an email from the field, where he's studying the impact of old-growth versus second-growth forests on fish.
The Obama administration's new policy states clearly that the Act is "only about preventing the complete extinction of a species, no more," Nelson says. "I would guess that the citizens of the United States, then and now, might have a very different answer."
Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor for High Country News. She writes from Southern California and tweets @judlew.]]>
Climate change is a real force disrupting wildlife populations. But for the 300 or so wolverines living in the lower 48, there's still not enough evidence of present or future danger to protect them under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday.
In February 2013, the agency proposed to list wolverines as threatened because climate change is eating away at spring snowpack in the northern Rockies, which in turn will harm wolverines since they raise their young in snowy dens. After more than a year of analysis, the agency officially withdrew its proposal this week.
It's an important listing decision, not only for dictating future wolverine management, but also for gauging the Fish and Wildlife Service's tolerance for using climate models to list species.
Most ESA listings result from threats that are already happening, such as habitat loss from human development. But the proposal to list wolverines was based largely on predictions of how future snowpack will shrink in their high-alpine denning regions. While the agency has always used ecological models to evaluate risks to sensitive species, climate predictions that play into the wolverine proposal add yet another layer of uncertainty.
Listing decisions based primarily on the threats of climate change also attract a new level of scrutiny since there have been so few. Thus far, polar bears, ringed seals and bearded seals are the only species listings primarily based on warming threats to their habitat.
If Tuesday's decision is any indication, the challenge of predicting highly specific, small-scale climate impacts may prove a major roadblock to endangered species protection for other animals as well. For example, a judge in Alaska recently ruled that bearded seals, which were considered threatened because of melting sea ice, should not have been listed.
The wolverine proposal was also out of the ordinary because these animals are not currently declining, as far as anyone knows. In addition to facing climate-related threats, wolverines were trapped and poisoned, wiping them out over much of the West in the early 20th century. Now they may even be recovering and some biologists think they could be expanding their range into places like Utah and Colorado.
While climate models predict spring snow cover loss across the wolverine's range by the end of the century, "we don't know that this loss of snow will equate to a commensurate loss of wolverine habitat or when it might limit wolverine populations," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday. The problem, from the agency's perspective, is that there's not enough specific information about how and why wolverines choose their snowy den sites to predict how devastated their habitat will be as the Earth continues to warm.
Ashe framed the agency's reversal as a case of two sets of scientists evaluating the same body of research and reaching different, yet reasoned, conclusions – which isn't that unusual. But environmental groups and some scientists see the agency's reversal as a bow to political pressure, namely from the states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, all of which opposed a listing.
"In this case the Service is using uncertainty as an excuse to override the expert judgment of its owns scientists and that's a really bad precedent," Shaye Wolf, climate science director for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview last month. CBD is one of the environmental groups involved in the legal settlement that spurred the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose listing wolverines last year. Nine organizations, including CBD, are now planning to challenge the listing decision in court.
Sarah Jane Keller is a High Country News correspondent based in Bozeman, Montana. She tweets @sjanekeller.]]>
In the dead of winter, female wolverines dig elaborate, multi-chambered dens to raise their young, choosing sites where snowpack lasts well into the spring. But snowpack in the Northern Rockies is almost certain to decline as the climate warms, jeopardizing their chances for successful reproduction. There are fewer than 300 wolverines in the Lower 48, and models show that they could lose 31 percent of their habitat by 2045 and 63 percent by 2085. And so, in February 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the "mountain devils" to the endangered species list.
The science behind the proposal has not changed, but the agency's position on it has. Mountain-Prairie Regional Director Noreen Walsh advocated against a speculative listing in a memo released by environmentalists in July, citing uncertainty as to exactly why wolverines need a persistent snowpack to reproduce and how its loss would harm the animals. Though scientists recommended listing wolverines as threatened, agency leader Dan Ashe defended her position – a strong indication of which way the final decision, due in early August, will go.
Wolverines would have been the first species in the Lower 48 thrust onto the endangered species list by climate change. A listing would have helped validate the use of climate models to develop strategies to protect animals against future threats. And it would have been unusual because, unlike most of the species the act safeguards, wolverines, though rare, are not thought to be declining.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming – the states that anchor the animal's range in the Lower 48 – dreaded the prospect of a listing and the public-land restrictions it could bring, while environmentalists cheered it on. In practical terms, though, would formal protections really help wolverines? Can a law that was designed to rescue species from discrete, localized threats also protect them from the more diffuse hazards of a warming world?
The Endangered Species Act has helped prevent the extinction of many species of plants and animals by removing specific threats to their survival, often only in areas designated as "critical habitat." Closing forest roads in prime grizzly habitat, for instance, helped keep poachers and stressful traffic at bay. Prohibiting the hunting or poisoning of wolves after they were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies allowed populations to rebuild. Restricting timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest took pressure off the northern spotted owl.
But the Fish and Wildlife Service can't simply rope off high mountain niches, exclude greenhouse gases and preserve the snow that wolverines depend on. Polar bears, bearded seals and ringed seals are already listed due to disappearing sea ice, yet carbon emissions continue to rise, and the Arctic is still melting.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued for greater wolverine protection, wants the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to include specific emissions targets in the plans they create to recover species threatened by climate change "to raise awareness about what these species need," says Shaye Wolf, the center's climate science director. But using the act to reduce greenhouse gases would be politically and practically impossible, argues J.B. Ruhl, a Vanderbilt University professor specializing in endangered species law. Scientists couldn't prove that a particular coal-fired power plant is responsible for the demise of polar bears, for instance. Plus, the idea has never had support in the agencies or the White House.
Still, listing species threatened by climate change isn't pointless. Recovery plans lead to basic conservation measures, such as long-term, range-wide monitoring of endangered populations and their habitats. Such unglamorous science is crucial to understanding what can be done to help at-risk species; it's not being done for wolverines, which are elusive and scarce, thus difficult and expensive to study. Insufficient funding for wolverine research also means that any decline in the population or devastating habitat changes might not be noticed until it's too late.
Additionally, the act includes an allowance for the introduction of "experimental" populations, which carry fewer land-use restrictions than existing populations that are declared endangered or threatened. In Colorado, wildlife managers have discussed introducing an experimental wolverine population for years. Trapping and poisoning wiped out wolverines in Colorado in the early 20th century, but its mountains could provide a snowy stronghold into the future. Now, however, the state is reluctant to reintroduce a species that could later become officially endangered.
Though few species have been listed primarily because of impending climate change, 66 percent of recovery plans now recommend action to cushion the impacts of warming. Of those, about 17 percent mention reducing greenhouse gas emissions, about half recommend monitoring, and most suggest actions to help species adapt, according to Wolf. These are incremental steps, but necessary to maintain the act's relevance in a warming world.
In the future, the Fish and Wildlife Service could take more creative approaches, like setting aside critical habitat that may not be ideal today, but could be essential tomorrow. Another option is to protect corridors that would allow species to move to friendlier climes as their current homes become less hospitable. The Endangered Species Act, explains Ruhl, hasn't solved traditional problems such as urban sprawl or invasive species – but it's helped species survive them. Similarly, the act must be used to address the effects, if not the causes, of a warming planet. "I think fundamentally this is about trying to help species to adapt to climate change," he says. "That's what the Endangered Species Act can help us do best."]]>
SEATTLE, Wash. - From 80 feet above downtown, the throngs of people wrapped in raincoats on the sidewalk below look like a spilled package of multicolored candies. The view is less colorful looking outward from the eighth floor window of the historic Cobb building, but no less busy; glass and steel high-rises thrust upward in every direction. Except to the west. There, cranes and warehouses and smokestacks meet the silver waters of Puget Sound. It's hard to imagine, but somewhere out there, just beyond the urban shore, schools of salmon still swim swiftly to and from the Pacific Ocean, as they have for thousands of years.
On the streets below, salmon kitsch is everywhere. Tourists traipsing this downtown area can buy salmon-engraved shot glasses, potholders shaped like chinook, and even salmon-shaped flashlights - squeeze the rubber fins and a light pops out the mouth. While images of the fish are ubiquitous, wild salmon (and steelhead, which fish biologists now classify with salmon) populations have never been so depressed. The federal government has listed 15 runs of Northwest salmon as threatened or endangered, yet in most cases they barely trickle. In many streams, a hungry otter or sea lion could wipe out an entire population of fish.
Here, above an ever-expanding sea of concrete and humanity, the idea of salmon recovery seems laughable. Yet in this small office, a no-nonsense conservation group called Long Live the Kings is working to bring wild stocks back to the Northwest. They aren't doing anything sexy: There's no talk of tearing down dams, ripping up roads or filing lawsuits against ranchers to keep cows out of streams. Instead, the group has tackled the mundane business of reforming Washington's hatcheries - those concrete fish-ponds where huge numbers of salmon are artificially spawned and reared for release in the wild.
It's an enormous task; Puget Sound and Coastal Washington alone have nearly 100 hatcheries, the largest concentration in the world. These hatcheries are designed to take the place of the salmon's natural breeding grounds: wild rivers. And the numbers are impressive. Managed by an assortment of state, federal, private and tribal groups, hatcheries produce an estimated 300 million fish every year.
So why should such productive enterprises be reformed? Because, as in so many instances where humans have inserted themselves into the affairs of wild creatures, numbers tell only a small portion of the story.
Ever since the first West Coast hatchery was built in California 130 years ago, hatcheries have served as a tool to perpetuate the all-American assumption that we can clear-cut forests, overgraze watersheds and dam rivers, and still have abundant salmon. Managers can do with a strip of glorified lap pools what it took nature a chunk of a continent to accomplish. Society has clung so dearly to that myth that it has ignored nearly a century of warnings. Some scientists say hatcheries are ineffective at best, and at worst, they may destroy wild salmon runs by spreading disease, watering down the gene pool and - perhaps most serious of all - serving as a convenient excuse not to deal with the real threat: inhospitable rivers.
It's a situation that has frustrated fish advocates to the point where some have called for the end of hatcheries. Yet the leaders of Long Live the Kings believe there is a middle road where both fish hatcheries and wild recovery are possible. Working with independent scientists and state, federal and tribal leaders, the group wants to use hatcheries not only to churn out oodles of fish for fishermen, but to produce fish that are almost indistinguishable from their wild brethren, fish that will serve as a repository for salmon genes until society develops the will to restore the rivers and ocean.
"We wanted to escape the religious debate of whether hatcheries are good or evil," says Barbara Cairns, director of Long Live the Kings, "With the (human) population expected to double in the next 25 years, we recognize that hatcheries will be here. As desperate pragmatists, we wanted to ask a different question - could we use hatcheries to help recover natural populations?"
The whoosh of traffic on Interstate 84 is the steady soundtrack playing at Oregon's Bonneville Hatchery. Sandwiched between the highway and the Columbia River, this expanse of concrete pools, lined up like tire tracks left by a Mack truck, houses tens of thousands of baby salmon. Nearly a century old, Bonneville produces 10 million salmon smolts annually. A federal employee wearing green waders walks the runways between the tanks tossing reddish pellets from a bright blue bucket. As the dusty substance hits the water, the surface boils with hungry fish mouths.
It is this very act of feeding that riles critics. By top-feeding the young fish, managers are unintentionally training them to swim to the surface, says Andre Talbot, a geneticist for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. When released into the wild after about a year of captivity, they will be easy prey for birds and fishermen, he says, quite unlike wild fish, which feed from the relative safety of the river bottom.
"This is like raising your children in the basement for 14 years and then kicking them out and telling them to go get a job," says Talbot. "These hatcheries are very good at producing lots of fish, but they don't do anything to help the natural ecosystems."
The problems created by traditional hatcheries are numerous: Crowded hatchery tanks are breeding grounds for bacterial diseases, which later can spread to wild populations; after release, hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and cover; and after several years in the ocean, the few surviving adults return to the hatchery tank where they were raised, robbing the river of the vital nutrients in their carcasses.
"These hatcheries are only concerned with producing fishing opportunities," says Talbot. "These fish are treated like a commercial product. They're not treated like a natural resource."
Wild fish, though, were very much on the minds of the builders of Bonneville Hatchery and other early hatcheries. It was erratic and declining runs of wild salmon - caused by over-fishing, the deterioration of the salmon's inland habitat from logging, mining, livestock grazing and farming, and the vagaries of the weather - that spawned the Northwest's hatchery era in the late 1800s.
"All civilized governments in the world (should) foster the science of fish culture," George B. Goode, a U.S. Fish Commission administrator, wrote in 1882. Hatcheries, he continued, were the only way "to bring back the number of salmon to what it was when nature was supreme."
The ability of managers to produce huge volumes of fish seemed a vast improvement over nature. In the wild, salmon lay eggs beneath the river's gravel bottom in nests called redds. The eggs can be stranded on dry banks as river levels drop, eaten by other creatures, crushed by elk or cattle, or silted in by runoff from clear-cuts and dirt roads. Using hatcheries, fish culturists could artificially spawn the parent fish, house the redds in the safety of incubators, and almost without fail, turn the eggs from a relatively small number of fish into an enormous new generation.
Facilities like the Bonneville Hatchery were clearinghouses for fish eggs from as far away as Idaho and southern Oregon. The progeny were released into rivers throughout the region - although rarely were the fish returned to their native streams. Early hatchery managers didn't understand that each river and stream has its own unique subspecies of salmon, highly adapted to site-specific flow regimes, habitat constraints and diseases.
"Very few, if any, of these fish survived; it was probably a wasted effort," writes Jim Lichatowich in Salmon Without Rivers, a searing critique of hatchery management. Published three years ago, his book recounts the ways that hatchery policy has stumbled and fallen, time and again.
"The more I looked into the history of hatcheries, the more disturbed I became," he says, staring out a window in what he calls, "the best office in the world." Beyond the blooming cherry trees that line his garden, the Columbia River rolls quietly past Columbia City, a small town north of Portland.
Lichatowich has had plenty of exposure to hatcheries in a 30-year career as a fish biologist; he has worked for state agencies in Oregon, tribes in Washington and as a consultant in both states. Over time, he became convinced that hatcheries were not only churning out doomed fish, but that they were hurting wild salmon. He discovered that he wasn't the first critic.
As early as 1928, Elmer Higgins, a head scientist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (the precursor to the National Marine Fisheries Service) announced to a crowded room of Fisheries' scientists that, "despite 55 years of artificial propagation, the Pacific salmon fishery has declined alarmingly." He and his supervisor called for more research, but though the findings of two subsequent studies called the hatchery program into question, nothing changed.
Despite such concerns, when the federal government wanted to pepper the Northwest with hydropower dams, it deemed hatcheries a convenient surrogate for habitat. Politically, there was no contest between cheap power and salmon.
"It is, therefore, the conclusion of all concerned that the overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thoroughgoing development of the Snake and Columbia are such that the present salmon run must be sacrificed," wrote Interior Secretary Julius Krug in a 1947 memorandum that set the department's policy on the Columbia River. With that directive, the states and federal government built approximately 65 hatcheries to compensate for the colonies of dams built throughout the next 30 years. Wild salmon began a downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.
As the industrial machine rolled onward, hatchery critics maintained a quiet but steady hum. After two decades of reports that indicated hatcheries weren't making any difference in the number of returning fish, a team of experts recommended to Congress in 1950 that future hatchery construction be deferred until they determined if existing hatcheries were effective. As a result, hatchery managers began to clip salmon fins in order to track returns and rate of capture by fishermen.
They learned that the numbers of hatchery fish returning to their spawning grounds were small compared to the vast number of fish released, but that commercial and recreational fishermen were catching predominately hatchery fish. The findings did not spur the agencies to examine whether wild fish were declining or why hatchery fish were dying in such large numbers. Instead, an emboldened hatchery fan club of fishermen lobbied politicians to spend more money on more hatcheries.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Interior Department and state agencies built dozens of additional hatcheries. Under pressure to demonstrate that tax dollars were spent wisely, hatchery managers began to provide better disease protection and delayed release of the fish into the wild until the smolts were older. Both decisions increased the rate of returns and pleased critics and fishermen.
Still, evidence mounted that hatchery production was not keeping pace with disappearing habitat and diminishing wild runs. Between 1976 and 1977, hatchery runs of coastal coho salmon in Oregon dropped from 3.9 million to 1 million. Across the Northwest, hatchery and wild runs were failing. Something was not working. Yet due to the chronic lack of monitoring and evaluation that had plagued the hatchery program since the 1870s, managers didn't know what had caused the collapse, nor how to fix the problem.
It would have made sense for the hatchery reform movement to have kicked into high gear following the revelations of 1977. But once again, politics kept the hatchery love affair alive.
Just a few years earlier, in 1974, Federal Judge George Boldt had ruled that Indians were entitled to 50 percent of all returning fish. Prior to the ruling, the non-Indian community had been harvesting 90 percent of the catch.
"It was so tense," recalls Peter Bergman, who was the chief of salmon programs for Washington state at the time. "There were shootings on Puget Sound."
Rather than endure a politically charged reduction in fishing, the Interior Department built the Makah and Nisqually Fish Hatcheries and gave Washington state $33 million to build 10 additional facilities. To soothe the furious and frightened non-Indian fishermen, the government aimed to produce its way out of scarcity.
Bergman blames the continued faith in hatcheries on a huge and complex bureaucracy that doesn't hold anyone accountable. The players include state hatcheries, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hatcheries, tribal hatcheries, and hatcheries run by private sports-fishing groups. In some cases, such as Bonneville, the state owns the hatchery but contracts with the feds to manage the facility. There are approximately 200 hatcheries in the Northwest, but no central entity oversees them, keeps track of the amount of fish produced, or even how many facilities exist. Information is squirreled away in literally hundreds of places. Add the huge personnel turnover within the agencies, and the fact that once fish are released into the rivers they don't return for six years, and it's clear why hatcheries are "run in a mindless fashion," says Bergman.
As wild salmon numbers continued to decline throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, more studies were called for and occasionally, those studies recommended reforms. But without significant financial commitment from legislators, no real change occurred. Then in 1999, three events conspired to shake the steady course of hatchery management.
The first occurred on March 16 - remembered by many fish managers as "a dark, dark day" - when the National Marine Fisheries Service listed nine more salmon runs under the Endangered Species Act. The agency would list two additional runs of Northwest chinook six months later.
For the first time, people in urban areas like Seattle and Portland felt the power of the Endangered Species Act. Suddenly, there were calls for restricted water use and new building codes to protect riparian areas. An investigation by the Portland Oregonian revealed that the federal and state agencies were planning to spend nearly $1 billion on salmon recovery programs for 2000 - nearly equivalent to the amount spent on health care for the entire state. For rural towns struggling to rebound from diminished logging in the aftermath of the spotted owl listing, the news landed hard.
Ron Yechout, the manager of a bank in rural Oregon, decided to fight back. The autumn before, while elk hunting, he had stumbled upon employees at Oregon's Falls Creek Hatchery clubbing hundreds of surplus hatchery salmon with baseball bats. He captured the bloody scene on video. As public furor grew over the potential impacts of the listings, Yechout began to show his home-movie.
"This salmon thing is the biggest artificial shortage ever created," says Yechout, drinking thin diner coffee near his home in Philomath. "How can they say we have endangered fish and then they're slaughtering thousands of perfectly good ones. This is a big bunch of political bullshit."
The video made headlines across the nation. Angry citizens demanded to understand how their tax dollars were being spent, and sued the Fisheries Service, claiming that there is no difference between hatchery and wild salmon (HCN, 10/9/00: Killing salmon to save the species). In the midst of this, Lichatowich released Salmon Without Rivers - the third major event.
These two last ingredients had the kick of cayenne and for the first time in a century, the agencies responsible for hatcheries found themselves in a political stew.
Into this mess stepped a new set of reformers. They surfaced at a banal conference center in the wake of the listing decision. A committee of state and federal agency directors, spurred by then-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., to investigate a solution for the most recent salmon crisis, recommended that a panel of independent scientists conduct a comprehensive evaluation of hatcheries on a case-by-case basis.
Long Live the Kings director Barbara Cairns, listening to the presentation, found herself counting off the ways the project would fail: An independent science panel wouldn't have authority to make any real change because it wouldn't control the state agencies' budget; without buy-in from the state and tribal managers, any suggestions from the panel would fall on deaf ears.
"I went up to (the chair of the panel) and said, 'I want in on this.' "
The plucky Seattle-area native and former legislative assistant for the environment for Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., got what she wanted. The nonprofit Long Live the Kings seemed uniquely qualified to lead a multi-agency effort: The group manages three hatcheries and has spent over a decade researching how hatchery fish can help wild stocks recover.
Over the past two years, the group has provided the panel of nine independent scientists with information on the history and goal of each hatchery and the status of the stocks and habitat. The scientists evaluate the hatchery to determine if it meets its goals without hurting wild-salmon recovery efforts. Long Live the Kings then coordinates with the hatchery managers to discuss how to implement the scientists' suggestions.
"We let the scientists be scientists and the managers be managers," says Cairns. "We create crosswalks between the two."
So far, the team has tackled 46 of the nearly 100 hatcheries in the region. And its findings have not all been glowing - in one case it has recommended the state shut down the facility, which the state plans to do July 1. Other suggestions range from changing the time when the run is spawned, to stopping the production of salmon that aren't native to the region, to installing screens on the pipes that suck river water into the hatchery - currently many of those pipes inadvertently suck and kill wild and hatchery fish as they migrate from the river to the ocean.
The scientists and Long Live the Kings hope that through this effort they will help to lessen the impacts of hatchery fish on wild runs, while creating more efficient and cost-effective facilities. They also want to take hatchery fish to the next level, and make them as much like wild fish as possible. While scientists on the panel say they're still exploring how to redesign hatcheries for a conservation purpose, they believe that rather than looking at how many fish the facilities should produce for harvest in two years they should be looking at how many fish society will need in the long term.
"I think in 200 years, we won't need dams anymore to produce energy, we'll have some other technology. Hatcheries should be used to hang on to genetic resources until then," says Don Campton, one of two geneticists on the panel and the regional geneticist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "I might be pipe-dreaming, but what other dream would somebody like to have?"
Managers seem enthusiastic about the calls for change. At a press conference last February, Jeffrey Koenings, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, announced, "I am committing my agency to implementation of this."
While this project is specific to the 100 hatcheries in the Puget Sound and in Coastal Washington, Cairns says that the scientific framework could be applied throughout California, Oregon and Idaho. Rowan Gould, the Portland-based deputy assistant director for fisheries of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, agrees:
"I think what they're doing is absolutely the right way to do business," he says.
Already, others are using the framework as a model. At the prompting of Congress, the Northwest Power Planning Council (a congressionally appointed committee funded by hydropower revenue that aims to mitigate for the effects of dams) is undergoing a review of how artificial production affects wild fish in the Columbia River Basin. Beginning in late June, a team of 10 scientists will begin to review the over 120 hatcheries in the basin, with the Power Planning Council acting as facilitator much like Long Live the Kings. The reform effort in Washington "has given us a lot of insights about how to conduct our review," says Bruce Suzumoto, a fisheries scientist for the council.
The fishing community is watching both efforts with uncharacteristically united support.
Joel Kawahora, a former Boeing engineer who returned to commercial fishing several years ago because "he hated the people and missed the water," says fishermen need hatcheries because the habitat for wild fish has become so poor.
"Have you ever watched your mother die of cancer? That's what it's like watching the urbanization around here," says Kawahora glancing outside a coffee shop near the crowded Seattle pier where his boat is parked. "There isn't a stream in the Puget Sound that isn't messed up."
Many fishermen, he says, understand that hatcheries have been mismanaged, but until the dams are gone and there are more fish, he says, the fishing community will fight for hatcheries.
Yet many fish biologists and conservationists believe these reforms are simply a way for state and federal agencies to continue to feed off the salmon cash cow and to perpetuate the myth that we can have healthy salmon populations without restricting the number of fish we harvest or restoring habitat.
"We're just putting a smiley face on what we want to do, (which is use hatcheries) the way we've always done it," says Joe Whitworth, executive director of Oregon Trout. "It will take years for the agencies and the fishing-dependent citizens to wean themselves from the hatchery narcotic."
Implementation will require money. Lots of it. While the majority of funding for hatchery reform has come from federal appropriations, money to implement change will come from the states and tribes, says Cairns. This spring, the Washington Legislature appropriated $1.25 million to begin implementing the scientists' recommendations, but that is a drop in the bucket. Cairns has no idea of the total cost but, she says, "when I throw a figure out there, people usually faint."
Beyond such difficulties lies the fundamental issue of whether reforming hatcheries will really do what it purports.
"Hatchery reform is like a chameleon. I think they're only changing the fabric; the structure is still the same," says Bill Bakke, director of the Native Fish Society. Bakke stands in the middle of Ten Mile Creek, a small wild stream near the Oregon Coast. The trees wear shawls of delicate moss and the salty air promises that this stream has only a few more miles to run before it reaches the ocean. Bakke sloshes forcefully across the river in tall khaki waders; with a silver cane, he points out salmon redds on the riverbottom.
"I'm under orders to kill every hatchery fish I can find," he says chuckling. We round the corner, stumbling through ferns; a steelhead jumps from the depths of the stream, arches and dives back into the deep pool. In the middle of the river, atop a sand bar, lies a fallen tree the size of a Suburban.
"That's what we really need to recover wild fish," says Bakke pointing to the tree, bleached as bone. Two-hundred- to 400-year-old trees create spawning areas for steelhead and rearing grounds for young salmon smolts, says Bakke. And size matters: Smaller logs are easily swept away by the current; even large trees will eventually be carried out to sea.
"That was once a 600-year-old Sitka spruce," he says pointing at a small riffle in the water. "The power of water is amazing."
Throughout the region, over 50 percent of habitat that includes trees this size has been altered. Even when only 25 percent of an area is logged, its hydrology and species composition change dramatically. According to Bakke, we've created an ecological hole that we can't fix with engineering.
That's why many scientists agree that hatchery reform isn't even half the solution.
"I can't think of one steelhead population that we can fix by just adding more fish," says Mark Chilcote, a fisheries biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "Even if we could get hatchery fish exactly like wild fish, it wouldn't help these populations."
In a recent study in which he reviewed salmon data collected over 26 years from 12 Oregon rivers, Chilcote concludes that hatchery fish are bad breeders; in many cases they were one-eighth as effective as native fish. He says that adding more hatchery fish to wild populations leads to their demise because when hatchery populations breed with wild fish, as they inevitably do, they in effect deplete the stream of its most effective spawners.
If we really want to recover wild populations, says Chilcote, we need to create additional habitat.
Given society's current trajectory, that's not likely to happen. With an expected population of 85 million in the Northwest by the end of the century, many predict wild salmon are doomed.
Back in Seattle, Barbara Cairns looks out over the sea of tourists and business people, and remains adamant.
"So, it takes 150 years to grow 150-year-old trees. What do we do in the meantime? Play ping-pong and eat bon-bons? I'm not willing to lose hope," she says grinning stubbornly. "I believe if we are smart and use hatcheries in concert with habitat recovery, the fish will come back. Hatcheries will be our holding tanks until then."
It's a bet the Legislature is willing to make. And it's a stance that makes even critics like Salmon Without Rivers author Lichatowich think twice.
"This reform effort is different from anything I've ever seen before, so I'm optimistic," he says. "Still, based on the history and the entrenched bureaucracy of the state agencies, I have to say, ÔI'll believe it when I see it.' "
Rebecca Clarren is associate editor for High Country News.
The chicken-sized ground-nesting bird, best known for elaborate mating dances and stubborn loyalty to ancestral mating grounds called leks, occupies massive swaths of 11 Western states and two Canadian provinces. And it has lately been figuratively looming over the region like a gigantic, balloon-chested, strutting Godzilla: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must make a court-ordered decision whether to formally protect it under the Endangered Species Act by 2015, potentially ushering in what many believe would be economically devastating land-use restrictions. Grouse numbers have declined by 90 percent, and habitat by about half, over the last century. In 2010, Fish and Wildlife found that an ESA listing was warranted, but that other species more urgently needed protection. That bought time for federal and state agencies, ranchers, conservationists, energy companies and others to mount massive recovery efforts in hopes of staving off the need for listing altogether.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Harney County's Soil and Water Conservation District will finalize one such project -- a collaboratively-developed private land conservation plan called a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, or CCAA, that will cover Harney's million-plus acres of private land. Landowners who sign on agree not to fragment habitat with subdivision or development and will apply conservation measures tailored to their properties, such as removing encroaching junipers that crowd the birds out, tagging fences to reduce lethal collisions, and altering grazing to improve forage and nest cover. In exchange, they'll avoid further regulation should the bird be listed.
More than 30 landowners have already committed, covering 250,000 acres. Oregon's seven other sage grouse counties will likely follow Harney's model, meaning all the state's habitat on private land would be covered by a CCAA before the listing decision, according to Fish and Wildlife's Oregon State Supervisor Paul Henson, though what impact that has depends on how many people sign up.
"Private landowners often view endangered species on their property as a risk. We want them to be seen as an asset," Henson says. That's a major advantage of voluntary agreements, since they foster the trust and buy-in necessary to get proactive habitat improvements on private lands, where federal authorities otherwise don't have much control beyond telling landowners what not to do.
With approximately 40 percent of occupied sage grouse habitat on private lands, the Obama administration has put a lot of muscle behind this approach in the lead up to the listing decision, from CCAAs developed in partnership with Fish and Wildlife to the massive Sage Grouse Initiative mounted by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which has put more than $350 million in Farm Bill and partner-supplied funds into conservation measures on some 953 ranches, covering 3.8 million acres across 11 states, since 2010.
And earlier this month, the administration rolled out a court-ordered revision of its critical habitat rules and policies for endangered species that appears to bolster its collaborative approach. The critical habitat designation is supposed to protect landscapes and features essential to a species' conservation, and thus comes with restrictions on how the land covered can be used. Among other things, the new draft, open for public comment through July 11, clarifies the terms under which non-federal lands covered by conservation agreements such as Harney County's CCAA can be excluded from critical habitat designations, essentially adding transparency and consistency to things Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries Service are already doing.
That's important, says Defenders of Wildlife Director of Endangered Species Conservation Ya-Wei Li, because while "critical habitat rarely has a regulatory impact on private land (it only affects projects that require a federal permit or federal funding), the perception is that it's this big monster and 'I can't put a swimming pool in my back yard' (if my land is designated). This policy is more about giving people peace of mind." That will help a lot in the West, says Henson, "especially for species where we need private and state landowners to commit. I think it will result in more conservation on nonfederal lands."
Indeed, just as dodging an ESA listing is a powerful motivator for conservation, so too does the specter of unavoidable ESA restrictions seem to have a chilling effect on private land conservation efforts. According to an NRCS report to the Western Governor's Association, landowner participation in the Sage Grouse Initiative declined precipitously on the Nevada-California border after Fish and Wildlife proposed listing a distinct population of grouse there as threatened. "While several factors likely influence landowner participation," NRCS Chief Jason Weller wrote, "13 producers who had submitted early applications (for SGI conservation funding) in fiscal year 2014 … withdrew their applications shortly after the listing announcement."
Li worries that the critical habitat proposal makes it too easy for the feds to exclude land covered by agreements developed in partnership with Fish and Wildlife or the Fisheries Service (CCAAs, as well as other arrangements called Safe Harbor Agreements and Habitat Conservation Plans). Some of those plans "are horrible," Li says, pointing to a recent CCAA for prairie chickens, which covers oil and gas development on the bird's range in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Because that particular CCAA allows temporary mitigations for "permanent impacts," he argues, it isn't nearly as protective as a critical habitat designation would be. He also nods to the controversy over a CCAA covering dunes sagebrush lizard habitat in Texas. Fish and Wildlife used the agreement as justification not to list the lizard as endangered, inspiring lawsuit from Defenders and the Center for Biological Diversity, who charge that the CCAA doesn't provide the agency with enough information on conservation measures for it to judge whether they'd be effective or not.
The resolution of the case will be interesting, Li says, because it "raises novel legal questions. How much can the Service rely on an agreement that has no track record? If you can do enough conservation to prevent (a species) from being listed, that's success. But there needs to be some real level of confidence that those activities are actually going to produce benefits."
Sarah Gilman is associate editor of High Country News. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman. Image courtesy of Flickr user Kathy & Sam.]]>
But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to change that grim narrative. According to a study by the federal government's eight-agency grizzly bear research team, lead by the U.S. Geological Survey, the rapid decline of whitebark pine since the early 2000s isn't the dietary disaster many predicted; so far, the bears are adapting. And since those dead and dying trees are the main thing keeping Yellowstone's bears on the endangered list, the new study will likely be used as another volley in the battle over grizzly conservation.
Citing the new research, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, a group of state and federal agencies charged with aiding grizzly recovery, recommended in late December that the Fish and Wildlife Service remove Yellowstone's bears from the endangered species list. The delisting debate is now caught between two competing scientific narratives: Either the ecosystem is collapsing out from under bears, due partly to climate change (which is no good for whitebark pine), or else grizzlies' built-in adaptability is helping them weather yet another change to their landscape. Whichever view prevails, whether on paper or in reality, it will have serious implications for the bears' legal status. Beyond that, though, it will affect how managers and the public view climate impacts in one of the most intact ecosystems left in the Lower 48.
Since they were first listed as threatened in 1975, grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park have increased from less than 150 to as many as 740, occupying at least 14 million acres today. Fish and Wildlife first delisted grizzlies in 2007, but after environmental groups sued, a district court ruled in 2009 that the agency had failed to fully consider the impacts of whitebark pine decline. Protections were restored, and a federal appeals court upheld the decision in 2011. But Fish and Wildlife contended that bears' diets are varied and flexible enough to weather the whitebark decline; pine nuts have always been a cyclical crop. So the interagency committee directed the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team to begin reviewing three decades' worth of grizzly research from the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the 20-million-acre region, consisting of the national park and adjacent state, federal and private land.
The Fish and Wildlife Service plans to make a decision soon on whether to draft a new delisting rule for public review – though if the past is any indication, court battles are likely to prolong the process. A new rule must show it's not taking a "full-speed ahead, damn-the-torpedoes approach to delisting," as 9th Circuit Court Judge Richard Tallman scolded in 2011. "The Service must rationally explain why the uncertainty regarding the impact of whitebark pine loss on the grizzly counsels in favor of delisting now, rather than, for example, more study," he wrote then.
With more data now in hand and on the way, the researchers have concluded that the multitude of other foods grizzlies eat can replace piles of fatty tree nuts. If grizzlies are suffering from the loss of whitebark, researchers would have expected to see them expand their individual home ranges in search for food (which is different from overall population expansion due to their increasing numbers), and wake up skinnier in the spring. But neither appears to have happened.
Yellowstone's bears eat over 200 different foods, ranging from high-elevation army cutworm moths and starchy biscuit root to ants and elk carcasses. Compared to bears in the mountains farther north, they are already big meat-eaters, but the study showed that they're likely compensating for pine nuts by consuming even more meat, including insects. Evidence of bears feeding on carcasses in the fall doubled from 2002 to 2011.
Still, the population has been growing more slowly, inching up at a rate that ranges from close to zero to 2.2 percent per year, compared to 4.1 to 7.6 percent from 1983 to 2001. (Though even bear population numbers are subject to scientific controversy.) But scientists say that kind of leveling off is expected in slowly reproducing large carnivores, like bears.
The bear study team believes that the population growth is flagging – and that bears are invading new areas, like livestock-rich valleys with subdivisions – because there are more bears now, not just because whitebark pines are dying. The bears started colonizing new areas in the '80s, before whitebark took a big hit. Scientists blame decreased cub survival for the slowing population growth, and cub deaths are associated with high bear densities, not dying whitebark. That suggests that population growth is slowing and bears are living in new areas because they are crowded, not because they are hungry.
"Some people have said we are pulling the habitat carpet out from under grizzly bears in Yellowstone (given the decline of both whitebark and cutthroat trout), but I'm not sure I agree," says Frank van Manen of the U.S. Geological Survey, the team's leader since 2012. Whitebark, he says, is a valuable part of a "very diverse and dynamic diet."
Some critics think the team's conclusions align too conveniently with Fish and Wildlife's long-time goal to delist. However, Chris Servheen, the agency's grizzly bear recovery coordinator, thinks that keeping grizzlies listed in spite of their recent successes will erode support for them, and for the Endangered Species Act. Bear numbers now surpass 500, one of the many minimum benchmarks for considering the population recovered. Servheen fears that keeping them listed will make it harder to drum up public support for bears beyond Yellowstone, in places like the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem in Montana and Idaho, the Selkirk Mountains, and Washington's North Cascades. "We desperately need more support of the ESA so we have political support to get it (funded) properly," he says. "There are many people who would like to see the ESA fail."
Since delisting Yellowstone grizzlies would mean transferring management to Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, bear advocates worry that the recommendation to delist might be tainted by state officials' long-standing desire to regain control of bears. While any delisting plan would maintain today's habitat protections in the bear's nearly 6 million-acre recovery zone, along with limits on bear deaths, the states will also likely begin bear hunting.
After grizzlies killed four people in the Greater Yellowstone region over a two-year period, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead wrote then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2012, saying that two years was too long to wait for the results of the food study. Keeping bears listed (and thus harder for the state to control) threatened public safety, he implied. He added that Wyoming pays millions for bear management, yet has no jurisdiction over grizzlies. Salazar promised to consider delisting in 2014.
This makes David Mattson – whose work on the grizzly study team from 1979 to 1993 helped establish the links between bear behavior, population trends and whitebark pine – worry that politics have crept into the scientific process. "Science is politicized by the questions you ask and how you ask the question," he says. Mattson, who was exiled from the grizzly world in the '90s for questioning delisting, is critical of the study's methods, interpretations and motivations. He is especially displeased about the team's unwillingness to release data to researchers outside the organization. (Van Manen says it's because the large, complex datasets require historical background knowledge to use properly.)
Mattson and others also think the report doesn't fully address the way increased meat-eating, especially of large animals like elk or livestock, could put bears at risk for lethal run-ins with people, should they venture down from high-elevation whitebark territory.
Meanwhile, the national environmental law group Earthjustice and the Bozeman-based Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which were involved in the earlier delisting suits, are waiting until the research project's results have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and a new delisting rule has been published before they judge the food study or the pro-delisting vote.
Neither Earthjustice nor Mattson are convinced that bears can adapt to the climate and bark beetle-driven loss of whitebark without a cost. "These ecosystems are already changing, and the Yellowstone grizzly bear shows us how deeply this (climate change) issue will affect the potential survival of some of the things we really care a lot about," says Tim Preso, an Earthjustice attorney for the Northern Rockies region.
If the impending delisting battle reinforces the view that grizzlies are climate change victims, it will help draw attention to the very real shifts happening in the ecosystem. If grizzlies are in fact adapting, that's good news, but it also means less iconic but struggling species will have to find their own way into the spotlight. The whitebark pine has yet to be added to the endangered species list.
Sarah Jane Keller is a contributor to High Country News. She tweets @sjanekeller.]]>
On Sept. 30, six environmental groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit against Fish and Wildlife, claiming that the abrupt reduction in habitat violates the Endangered Species Act. The 30,010 acres don't offer enough high-elevation old-growth forest, they say, and the reduction further shifts responsibility for the species' survival to Canada, where most of the world's woodland caribou now roam.
A compact man with sapphire eyes and a tanned face, Ramey thrives on fieldwork. "I've risked my life for endangered species," he says. He's shot tranquilizer darts at elephants in Zimbabwe, led posses of bewildered locals on harebrained plots to herd Argali sheep in Mongolia, and nearly crashed in a helicopter while studying bighorn sheep in Death Valley.
As he walks, Ramey pontificates — about the importance of getting out into the wild, his critics, and the problems he sees with the Endangered Species Act. At times, his brain seems to spit out ideas faster than his tongue, or lungs, can keep up. Halfway up the climb he stops, not from fatigue, but because he needs to catch his breath after making an especially emphatic point.
At the top of the ridge, Ramey pulls a spotting scope from his well-worn backpack and focuses the viewfinder on the eagle's nest. "Oh, look! Mom's feeding junior," he says.
Glassing the eaglet, Ramey acts like a father watching his child's first steps. But Ramey is careful not to fall into the role of an overly protective parent, and that resistance has won him few friends in the environmental community.
Just up the canyon from here lies Security Risk Crag, one of several rock-climbing areas the U.S. Forest Service's Boulder Ranger District closes off each spring to protect eagles' nests. Ramey supports the policy, but when climbers questioned whether the nest at Security Risk was in fact used by eagles, he responded with the mantra that has guided his career: "Show me the data."
Ramey rappelled into the nest and analyzed its contents. He found no evidence that eagles had ever laid eggs in the nest — he suspects it's used by ravens — and he backed a movement to keep the crag open year-round. So far, the District's policy hasn't changed, but Ramey's actions earned him scorn from some Boulder environmentalists. "Some people didn't want to accept the facts," he sighs.
The eagle hullabaloo symbolizes the larger criticisms Ramey has lobbed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's efforts to protect threatened species. Too often, he says, conservation decisions are based on hypothetical threats or overly cautious assumptions, rather than hard facts.
As evidence, Ramey points to the Preble's meadow jumping mouse, a creature found only in streamside areas along Colorado's Front Range. The 3-inch-long mouse has powerful, elongated back legs and clown-sized hind feet that can propel it three feet in a single hop. To evade predators, the mouse can jump like a kangaroo, up to 18 inches high, using its 6-inch-long, whip-like tail as a rudder to switch directions in mid-air. But the little acrobat's most famous feat is its leap onto the Endangered Species list, a move that has hindered the march of bulldozers along the base of the Rocky Mountains.
One of 12 subspecies of meadow jumping mouse (Zapus hudsonius), the Preble's mouse was first described in Colorado by naturalist Edward A. Preble in 1899. Nearly a century later, in May 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the mouse as threatened and designated 31,222 acres of critical habitat. The listing placed new restrictions on development in moist meadows and streamside areas from Colorado Springs to Laramie, raising the ire of developers and some residents, who complained that, in the words of one letter-writer, the government was putting a disease-carrying rodent ahead of the rights of landowners. Meanwhile, environmentalists rejoiced: The little mouse had given them a new weapon in their drive to limit development in Colorado's growing metro areas.
Enter Ramey, who, in 2002, got to digging through the scientific literature after a colleague suggested they collaborate on a Preble's mouse project. Ramey found that the 1954 monograph that classified the Preble's mouse as a distinct subspecies, had — like many such distinctions of its day — been based almost entirely on the critter's physical characteristics. Philip Krutzsch, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, had made the designation based on coat color and skull measurements – and he'd done so using just a handful of mice. "He'd only looked at four adults and seven juvenile specimens. Juveniles have tons of variation in their coat color," says Ramey, who at the time worked at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
With so few specimens, it was possible that the differences Krutzsch had used to split the Preble's mouse into a new subspecies were just an artifact of his small sample size. "I said, 'Aha! This is the question to ask: Is this mouse really distinct?' " says Ramey.
What happened next threw Ramey smack into the middle of one of the Endangered Species Act's ugliest quagmires. On the surface, it looks like a simple dispute between "lumpers" — biologists who pack varying plants or animals into a single species or subspecies — and "splitters" — those who see such variations as reason to divide wildlife into different classifications. But the debate runs much deeper than science, touching on issues that involve philosophy as much as science. One central question: As long as the government possesses only limited funds to float an endangered species ark, how should it decide which passengers to allow onboard?
The saga began in August 2002, when Ramey proposed to test whether the Preble's mouse truly qualified as a unique subspecies. The idea elicited a lukewarm response from the Fish and Wildlife Service, but in December, Ramey received a letter from the governor of Wyoming informing him that the state would fund his study. Wyoming had been a reluctant partner in Preble's mouse protection, and state officials jumped at the chance to poke holes in the designation. Eventually, the Fish and Wildlife Service, along with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, also kicked in money for the study.
Before he began, Ramey laid out the criteria he would use to determine whether Preble's qualified as a subspecies. He would look for distinctness in its physical traits, in its ecology and in its genes. The mouse need not turn up uniqueness in all of these areas, Ramey said, but it should prove distinct in the majority of them. One by one, the team pitched these criteria to the mouse. And one by one, the mouse began to miss.
Ramey's colleague, Lance Carpenter, measured the skulls of museum specimens to test Krutzsch's assertion that the Preble's mouse skulls were smaller than those of other meadow jumping mice. Carpenter measured nine characteristics of the Preble's skulls, and found that they were smaller in only one. The morphological differences noted in Krutzsch's monograph were merely "unsupported opinion," Ramey would write in his report. Strike one.
Likewise, when Ramey's team scanned the scientific literature for evidence of ecological differences between the Preble's mouse and other nearby subspecies, they found none. Ramey argued that if, during the 100-plus years the mouse had been classified as a subspecies, no one had published evidence that the mouse possessed unique ecological or adaptive traits, it was reasonable to conclude that they didn't exist. Strike two.
Finally came the genetic work. Genetic testing didn't exist in Krutzsch's day, but by the time Ramey met the mouse, scientists had developed high-tech tools for peering into DNA and detecting even minute genetic differences. This has become the gold standard for determining whether populations are distinct.
Ramey's team compared DNA from the Preble's mouse to that of several nearby jumping mouse subspecies. The researchers examined two types of DNA — one found within the nucleus of cells, the other from organelles called mitochondria, which are passed from mothers to their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA evolves more quickly than nuclear DNA, so if the Preble's mouse was starting to evolve separately from other meadow jumping mice, this shift would be expected to turn up in the mitochondrial DNA first.
But the Preble's mitochondrial DNA sequences also turned up in the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, a subspecies found in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. The nuclear DNA showed only small differences between the Preble's mouse and the Bear Lodge mouse, the kind of variation that Ramey says you would expect to find in any normal population of a single species.
With three strikes against it, Ramey concluded that the Preble's mouse was simply a population of the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse. He recommended that the two be lumped together as one subspecies.
When Ramey went public with his study in December of 2003, the crowd on both sides of the ballpark went berserk. The state of Wyoming, which had funded Ramey's work, wasted no time filing a petition to remove the Preble's mouse from the threatened species list. A coalition of builders, businesspeople and agricultural interests calling itself Coloradoans for Water Conservation and Development co-signed the petition. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the Preble's listing alone costs developers and landowners as much as $18 million a year; developers put the cost much higher.
Politicians seized on Ramey's work as proof that the Endangered Species Act was protecting a mouse that had never existed in the first place. Senator Wayne Allard, R-Colo., called for the creature's immediate delisting. House Representative Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., introduced a bill that would have delisted the Preble's mouse and forbidden it from receiving any future Endangered Species Act protection.
Meanwhile, environmental groups pointed to delisting efforts as evidence of political tampering with science — accusations that grew more shrill when Ramey signed on as a consultant for the Interior Department, and testified before Congress in favor of Endangered Species Act reform. "If the Bush Administration really cared about good science, as they are so fond of claiming, and if they had any respect at all for the law, their decision would be a no-brainer," the Center for Native Ecosystems, a Denver-based environmental group, wrote on its Critterthink blog. "Alas, we all know this was never about the science or the law. This is about politics and money."
When the Fish and Wildlife Service asked 14 scientists to review Ramey's report and verify his conclusions, their results did little to quell the debate.
Geneticist Keith Crandall of Brigham Young University was thoroughly convinced by Ramey's argument, calling his conclusion "robust" and "strongly supported by all forms of data examined." Others, such as Gary White of Colorado State University, felt that Ramey's work was insufficient to overturn a long-standing subspecies classification. Ramey's conclusions, White wrote in his review, "are an example of basic statistical misinterpretation."
What everyone did seem to agree on, however, was the need for a more definitive answer. So the Fish and Wildlife Service commissioned U.S. Geological Survey geneticist Tim King to conduct an independent genetic analysis of the Preble's and several other meadow jumping mouse subspecies.
A quiet man who shuns the limelight, King works at the Leetown Science Center in Kearneysville, W. Va. He conducted a genetic analysis of Atlantic salmon that was cited in the decision to place the fish on the endangered species list. He was chosen in part because he had never worked with the Preble's mouse, and was not a stakeholder in the debate.
Like Ramey, King examined snippets of DNA from various populations of Preble's and four neighboring jumping mouse subspecies. But where Ramey tested a few individuals from many different populations, King looked at DNA from many individuals from a smaller number of populations. Each approach has its dangers. Collect DNA from too few individuals from a given population, and you may not detect the true patterns of variation within that group. Collecting many samples from each population solves this problem, but unless you sample every population, you still may miss differences that exist in these groups. Ideally, the two sampling methods would be combined, but in the real world, funding and time constraints can make this impossible.
King tested two regions of mitochondrial DNA and 21 regions of nuclear DNA from each individual. Unlike Ramey, King saw clear distinctions between the Preble's mouse and the other four subspecies. In a peer-reviewed report sent to the Fish and Wildlife Service in January 2006, King argued that the variations suggested that the Preble's mouse had mutated and diverged from other meadow jumping mice.
King pointed out that Krutzsch split the Preble's mouse from other subspecies based not only on its physical features, but also on its geographic isolation. A gap of 60 miles or more separates the Preble's mouse from the nearest Bear Lodge mouse populations, and King says that the differences that have evolved in the Preble's DNA show that it has been isolated from other subspecies for thousands of years.
To King, the implications were clear: The Preble's mouse was headed down its own, unique evolutionary path. "The data are unequivocal," he said.
Two studies. Two opposing conclusions. While it might smell of dirty politics, such conflicts are not unheard of in taxonomy. The problem arises because scientists can't agree on a definition of species, let alone subspecies, says Susan Haig, a geneticist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center in Corvallis, Ore. Taxonomists have spent entire meetings, even whole careers, debating species concepts without ever reaching an agreement. "It's not like scientists are space cadets," Haig says. "It's the fact that technology changes, our view of the world changes, we learn more."
At issue are questions like: How unique must a population be to warrant status as a subspecies? Is geographic isolation enough, or should genetic differences or physical traits like size or pelt color be required too? Which traits should carry the most weight? How much intermixing can go on between subspecies without jeopardizing their status? Science has yet to reach a consensus on these issues, says Haig. "Someone puts out a definition, and people pick it apart and refine it, and then other people pick it apart and keep refining it."
The debate that once took place at obscure conferences has spilled into the public arena, because under the Endangered Species Act, subspecies receive as much protection as full species. In fact, 20 percent of all the wildlife species protected by the act are actually subspecies. Deciding where to draw the lines between subspecies is critical, but the Fish and Wildlife Service's guidelines are open to interpretation.
In the case of the mouse, Ramey chose one definition and King chose another. Stakeholders on both sides of the debate claimed the science lay in their court. And to some extent, both sides were right.
The debate roiled for nearly three years, with neither side giving an inch. "King has what I consider a very, very low bar," said Ramey. He argued that the genetic differences King found between Preble's and the Bear Lodge mouse were not biologically meaningful, because they were found in "neutral markers," which don't encode genes. "Most people would call this junk DNA," Ramey said, adding that he'd found similar levels of genetic variation between populations of bighorn sheep on opposite sides of Interstate 40 in California. "The sheep are literally staring across the highway at each other," he said.
But King's backers argued that Ramey failed to gather enough data to test his criteria, which they called unduly strict. "The King study literally quadrupled the amount of genetic data and found clear separations between all five subspecies," said Sylvia Fallon, a conservation genetics fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. "Ramey and King aren't arguing over where to draw the line. Ramey's study failed to find any lines to draw because he didn't have enough information."
Ramey's critics also questioned his interpretation of his results. "Ramey set a very, very high bar," said Wayne Spencer, a biologist at the Conservation Biology Institute in San Diego, who, at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service, reviewed both papers. "The genetic tests (Ramey) used don't even show differences between valid species, like between polar bears versus grizzlies," he said.
King added fuel to the fire this June, when he submitted a paper for publication in the journal Molecular Ecology revealing that he tried, and failed, to replicate some of Ramey's genetic data. In dispute are seven Bear Lodge mouse museum specimens that, in Ramey's study, turned up mitochondrial DNA sequences also found in Preble's mouse specimens. King's work showed that none of these seven specimens contained the Preble's sequences. What's more, King turned up discrepancies in more than a dozen nuclear DNA sequences from Ramey's museum specimens, which, King said, suggested a systematic error in Ramey's methods.
Ramey said he was looking into the samples in question and will file a correction if his original data were wrong. But he argued that the dispute was not about whose dataset was most robust, but about how to interpret the data. "Tim can find these statistically different things between populations, but how biologically significant are they? If you look at species and subspecies through the end of a pipette you can lose the forest for the trees." In fact, neither Ramey nor King has ever seen a live Preble's meadow jumping mouse.
Whose conclusions were correct? Both of them, said BYU's Keith Crandall, who, with funding from Wyoming, combined and analyzed both datasets. Though Crandall came down on Ramey's side, he acknowledged that King's arguments had merit. "They both collected data relevant to the questions they posed and both addressed them in ways that they thought were reasonable and came to opposite conclusions," Crandall said. "How do you resolve that? You don't. You argue until the cows come home."
But the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't have that kind of time. By law, the agency must respond to Wyoming's petition to delist the Preble's mouse by the first week of August. The agency needs an answer now. So with the clock ticking and the entire Front Range looking on, the agency contracted the Portland-based Sustainable Ecosystems Institute to convene a panel of scientists to weigh the scientific evidence.
The panel meets in early July, in a small conference room at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. A courtroom-like aura hangs in the room. The three panelists — Brian Arbogast of Humboldt State University, John Dumbacher from the California Academy of Sciences and Scott Steppan of Florida State University — sit behind a table at the front of the room. Given their distinct morphology (bald head), adaptations (identical Macintosh laptops) and behavior (a tendency to ask probing questions) the panelists themselves might qualify as a distinct subspecies under some definitions.
The audience includes scientists from several universities and the Fish and Wildlife Service, employees of a Colorado Springs utility, representatives from numerous environmental groups, a landowner who claims the Preble's mouse has prevented him from developing his five-acre parcel on Monument Lake, and representatives from the offices of several politicians, including a well-coiffed woman who will type messages on her BlackBerry throughout much of the meeting.
The mouse itself is absent, but Craig Hansen, a flamboyant young biologist who has spent hours tagging and tracking the little creatures, passes around his newly bound master's thesis like a new father with his firstborn's baby book. "Just look at his feet — they're huge!" Hansen exclaims, pointing at a photo. "These mice are so cool!"
Ramey arrives dressed to perform in a sporty suit and a tie adorned with elephants and lions. He sits restively in the front row next to another suit — Wyoming's assistant attorney general. "I want to pursue truth and I'm ready to do battle," Ramey says.
King, perhaps the tallest man in the room, is also the most reserved. Casually attired in jeans, and clearly determined to keep the focus on his research and not himself, he settles in an empty row on the opposite side of the room from Ramey and further back.
Steven Courtney, vice president of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, opens the meeting with a quote from Niccolò Machiavelli. "A hypothesis is always more believable than the truth, for it has been tailored to resemble our ideas of truth, whereas the truth is just its own clumsy self." The panel's mission, Courtney says, is to seek the clumsy truth about the Preble's mouse.
Panelist John Dumbacher gives an overview of the scientific controversy. He explains that rather than trying to agree on a definition of a subspecies, the panel will compile an array of definitions and assess the same three lines of evidence that Ramey first pitched at the Preble's mouse — its physical traits, ecology and genetics — to determine where the mouse falls within each definition.
The panelists quickly delve into the mouse's physical characteristics, and Dumbacher calls Ramey up to the front to talk about his study. Before he begins, Ramey walks over and extends a hand to King. It is the first time the two have met. "I want to offer a personal apology to you for comments that ended up in the press," Ramey says, no doubt referring to his statement to the Rocky Mountain News that "Tim King's station in life seems to be to do scientific colonoscopies." King nods, but declines to engage Ramey. Then it is Ramey's turn to take a drubbing. Sacha Vignieri, the lead author on a vigorous rebuttal of Ramey's work published in Animal Conservation, rings in on the speaker phone from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and tells the panel that Ramey's team tested only one of Krutzsch's original six skull characteristics and none of his five pelt traits.
James Patton, curator at the University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, echoes her concerns. If someone wants to overturn an existing taxon, then at a bare minimum, "You need to go back and evaluate the original criteria used to name that taxon," Patton tells the panel via speaker phone. "I don't think that has been done."
Ramey passionately defends his choice of traits. At times he speaks so breathlessly that the court reporter hired to transcribe the meeting asks him to slow down. He tells the panel that his team eliminated characteristics that were subjective, like pelt color, and focused on traits they could measure.
The panel quizzes both Ramey and King about their genetic results. Ramey insists that the DNA put the Preble's mouse on a tiny, unimportant twig on the mouse family tree. King responds that Ramey's strict criteria would only find differences between full-blown species, not the more subtle differences between subspecies. "I don't want to know if it's a species. I want to know if it's a subspecies," King says, never raising his voice. At times, the court reporter cranes her head forward to hear King, and more than once, a panelist inches the microphone closer to him so all can hear.
Questions about the mouse's ecological traits evoke heated debate. Ramey says that not a single published study has found evidence that the mouse possesses unique ecological or adaptive traits, but Dumbacher appears skeptical. "Not finding a difference is different from finding that there is no difference," Dumbacher says.
Vignieri, on the speaker phone, argues that such differences are likely to exist, because the Preble's subspecies lives only near water. "They're clearly specialized to riparian habitat. They might not specialize on a particular fungi, but they do specialize." It's an important point, because if the mouse is limited to a specific habitat, it cannot spread just anywhere and could feel the loss of habitat more acutely than it would if it could simply pick up and move.
Crandall, who sports a gray suit and a Marlboro Man mustache, tells the panel that the only sure way to determine whether the Preble's mouse is ecologically unique would be to put a Preble's mouse in a Bear Lodge population. If the Preble's mouse not only survives, but also plays the same role in the local ecosystem, the two mice are obviously interchangeable. However, says Crandall, it's an experiment that clearly can't be done with an endangered species.
The verbal pingpong goes on like this for two days. At times, Ramey seems grossly outnumbered, but he refuses to back down. For every argument made against him, Ramey stands ready with an explanation.
But when panelists dig in to the disputed DNA data, Ramey seems to shut down. When asked technical questions about the discrepancies between his and King's DNA results, Ramey repeatedly answers, "You'll have to ask Hsiu-Ping (Liu)" — his colleague, a faculty member at the University of Denver, who did the DNA analysis. He gives panelists Liu's phone number, but efforts to reach her initially fail.
As the panel winds down, both sides seem ready to declare victory. If a consensus has emerged, it is that good scientists must sometimes agree to disagree. Dumbacher wraps up the discussion by commending both Ramey and King. "I'd hate for my own research to have to undergo this kind of scrutiny," he tells them. Courtney closes the panel by saying, "There is no need to identify a winner here in personal terms. The winner is the scientific process."
When the panel releases its report in late July, the conclusion proves surprisingly unequivocal: The Preble's mouse is a distinct subspecies. "The available data are broadly consistent with the current taxonomic status of (the Preble's mouse)," the report says. "No evidence has been presented that critically challenges that status." Even more stunning, the panelists have found that some of Ramey's DNA samples show signs of contamination, which could account for the discrepancies between his study and King's.
But even if Ramey's data crumbled under scrutiny, his philosophical stand did not. "This doesn't change anything," he says. The latest verdict, like all other decisions about subspecies designations, will remain arbitrary until scientists can agree on a definition of subspecies, he says. "What's your listable entity? That's the real question."
And Ramey's philosophical arguments remain. At its core, the Preble's dispute was never really about whether the mouse is a species or subspecies. Strip away the dueling datasets and clunky jargon and the dispute comes down to a philosophical question about what the Endangered Species Act should protect. When King and Ramey step back from the scientific debate, they both acknowledge this.
"It doesn't matter to me whether it's a subspecies or a distinct population segment," says King. "Any group within a taxa that appears to be reproductively isolated and heading down a different evolutionary trajectory from another group warrants conservation and attention, or at least consideration."
Not so fast, says Ramey. He argues that there's a danger in overzealously applying caution to endangered species decisions. "If you set the bar too low, you completely dilute your effectiveness," he says. "We can make a conscious decision as a society that we want to give local populations of mice that have low levels of genetic differences the full protection of the Endangered Species Act. But ask yourself what it's going to mean for the really unique things that you now don't have the money to protect."
A priority system for applying the Endangered Species Act exists, but a 1988 General Accounting Office report criticized the Fish and Wildlife Service for not adhering to it. A recent study showed that things have hardly improved since then, with species that occur in urban areas receiving disproportionate funding at the expense of island species facing more urgent threats.
The genetic research, which many people have looked to for answers, only seems to add to the arbitrary approach. The Fish and Wildlife Service provides no guidelines on how genetic data should be used to make listing decisions. When Sylvia Fallon with the Natural Resources Defense Council recently reviewed more than 40 listing decisions, she discovered that the amount and type of genetic data that informed these decisions were all over the map. Studies that had used large amounts of genetic information tended to result in decisions that granted Endangered Species Act protection, while those that used less genetic data were more likely to end in verdicts that declined protection.
Ramey argues it's time to change the way the Endangered Species Act is used. As it stands, the law is wielded far too often as a weapon against development at the expense of species that truly need protection, he says. Society shouldn't need to find an endangered species in an area to save it: "If you want some open spaces that have lots of plants and animals in them, ultimately that's the value, so let's use that."
Other options do exist for protecting the habitat of the Preble's mouse. Some Front Range communities collect funds to buy and protect open space, and private groups might also step in to pay for riparian habitat protection. But these strategies lack the teeth of the Endangered Species Act, and they cannot protect whole swaths at once.
And environmentalists counter that, until the laws change, the Endangered Species Act is the best tool they have for protecting ecosystems, something that not only benefits listed species, but everything else that uses an ecosystem, including humans. "This mouse is found only along healthy streamsides, so protecting it also means protecting our drinking water," says Erin Robertson, a staff biologist at the Center for Native Ecosystems. She acknowledges that reasons for protecting the Preble's mouse extend beyond the little critter itself. The Preble's mouse occurs on a habitat that's quickly being developed: "That's the bang for the buck on the mouse," she says.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will announce its decision on the delisting petition any day now — potentially before this issue arrives in your mailbox. But regardless of the outcome, the story doesn't end here. While the panel's report slams the door on the taxonomic arguments in the current delisting petition, those pushing to delist have a plan B at the ready. In March, Wyoming Attorney General Patrick Crank and his counterpart from Colorado, John Suthers, wrote to Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall, arguing that, subspecies or not, the mouse is more abundant than scientists first thought. "The Preble's mouse is not threatened," they wrote, "it was just not well trapped in 1998" when it was given Endangered Species Act protection.
No doubt, if the Fish and Wildlife Service denies Wyoming's existing petition to delist the mouse, another petition will be close behind.
If that happens, both sides of the debate will again look to science for support. But in the end, science may represent more of a trap than a solution. Science can answer questions about this mouse's physical and genetic traits and its role in the ecosystem, but it cannot make the final call. The question of whether the Preble's mouse —and the vanishing streamside habitat along Colorado's Front Range — deserve protection is one that society must answer for itself.
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning freelance writer in Cedaredge, Colorado. Her work has appeared in more than 30 publications, including National Wildlife, New Scientist and Skiing.
Terms commonly used in endangered species discussions – species, subspecies and distinct population segment – are explained
—Singer Willie Nelson, arguing against the slaughter of horses for human consumption
Interior's fuzzy science. If it were up to many U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, the Endangered Species Act would now protect the Gunnison's prairie dog, the Gunnison sage grouse, the white-tailed prairie dog and a host of other critters. But none of those species made the list, thanks in part to Department of Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald, who tinkered with or ignored agency biologists' findings. Documents obtained in October by conservation groups reveal MacDonald's interference with her own scientific advisers. MacDonald, a Bush appointee whose background is in engineering, not biology, "edited" her scientists' reports, adding or deleting phrases to reverse the meaning of their recommendations. In a document recommending protection of the Gunnison sage grouse, she injected doubt regarding the grouse's designation as a species, despite almost universal agreement in the scientific community that it is a distinct species.
Water scales may finally be in balance. More than a decade in the making, the Platte River Cooperative Agreement is almost ready to come to life. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne signed the three-state agreement divvying up Platte River water in late September. Colorado and Nebraska have also approved it, and Wyoming is expected to sign soon. The river provides drinking water for more than 3 million people, irrigates 2 million acres of farmland, and provides a vital migration stopover for birds in Nebraska. The $317 million agreement tries to balance these needs while restoring habitat for several threatened and endangered species. It calls for the acquisition of 10,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Nebraska and for flows to be increased by 130,000 to 150,000 acre-feet during critical times. Groundwater irrigators along the river will be hardest hit — they can't drill any new wells, and must reduce their groundwater usage to 1997 levels. The Interior Department will pay $157 million of the total and the states will pony up the rest.
Going great guns in
Glacier? In 2004, an avalanche blocked a section of
railroad tracks running through the southern edge of
Montana's Glacier National Park for 29 hours. That prompted
Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad to propose shelling
slide-prone slopes within the park, as is done to manage avalanches
along highways throughout the West. But park officials worry that
the use of explosives would endanger park visitors and alter the
natural role of avalanches. Instead, they want the railroad to
build new snowsheds and upgrade existing ones; the sheds are both
more effective against avalanches and have less impact on the park.
Railroad representatives say the expense — estimated at $110
million — would be prohibitive, but few take that claim
seriously. According to Steve Thompson of the National Parks
Conservation Association, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which had
$13 billion in revenue last year, can, and should, cover the costs
as a normal part of doing business in the mountains. In October,
the draft environmental impact statement for the plan was released,
listing snowsheds, not explosives, as the preferred alternative.
The park will take public comment on the plan until Dec. 22.
Biodiesel isn't just old French fry oil anymore. The country's largest biodiesel refinery is being built in western Washington. Upon completion in mid-2007, the Imperium Renewables Inc. plant will produce up to 100 million gallons of fuel each year from soybean, canola and other crops. That amount exceeds last year's nationwide production total of 75 million gallons, and is enough to replace up to 10 percent of the state's conventional diesel supply. Until Washington farmers can produce enough feedstock for the $60 million plant, it will import palm oil from Malaysia. Nationally, biodiesel production is likely to hit the 150 million gallon mark by the end of 2006, and half of it will come from the dozen major biodiesel plants already operating in the West. Imperium and other producers hope to cash in on the rapidly expanding interest in alternative fuels and the new laws promoting them, including a Washington statute requiring that by 2008 all diesel fuel sold in the state contain at least 2 percent biodiesel.
A fence — sort of — President Bush signed a bill in October authorizing 700 miles of fencing to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border. It's the only federal immigration bill passed during a year of congressional debate on the subject.
Critics on both sides of the debate question the bill's effectiveness: It will leave some 1,300 miles of border unfenced, and it doesn't contain enforcement measures. Nor does it help foreign workers enter the country legally.
But the fence may never be built, anyway. The double-layer steel fencing will cost between $2 billion and $7 billion, and so far, only $1.2 billion has been appropriated. Whether Congress will pony up more money after the mid-term elections remains to be seen.
1:127 Ratio of foreclosures to households in Colorado in the third quarter of 2006.
1st, 2nd Foreclosure rate rank, nationally, of Colorado and Nevada respectively.
23.8 Percentage drop in existing home sales in the West between September 2005 and September 2006.
$332,000 Median home price in the West in September 2006 — 4.3 percent lower than a year earlier.
-9.7 Percentage median home prices are expected to drop in Stockton, Calif., in the coming year. Six cities in central California, two in Nevada, and one in Arizona are among the 10 cities with the highest projected drops in home prices.
$390,138,000 Total amount spent nationwide on constructing new, single-family homes in September 2006
-12.8 Percentage drop in new home construction from the same period last year.
Sources: Realtytrac.com, the National Association of Realtors, U.S. Department of Commerce, and CNNMoney.com]]>