Why the Sand Mountain blue butterfly does not warrant being listed as an endangered species

August 8, 2006
By Jon Crowley, www.DuneGuide.com

Just today, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Reno, Nevada reported that is had decided to take the next step towards listing the Sand Mountain blue butterfly as a federally protected species under the Endangered Species Act. While this news is not surprising, most folks still fail to grasp the big picture of protecting this little insect that lives in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The Endangered Species Act was passed into law with the noblest of intentions over thirty years ago, but it has become a favorite tool for environmental extremist bent on shutting down access to public land. The original purpose of the act was to protect species like the bald eagle, wolves and grizzly bears. The intent of the act was never to provide protection for species like insects, or subspecies where the species as a whole are not threatened.

What makes the case of the Sand Mountain blue even more frustrating is this butterfly is a subspecies of a larger family of blue butterflies found throughout the Great Basin. When this new butterfly was “discovered” and described back in the 1990’s, there was discussion about whether to lump it in, or split it into a new subspecies. Few people realize that there is absolutely no government oversight over this process of creating a new species or subspecies. The classification of a subspecies is arbitrary, artificial and subjective depending on who's in charge. Some tend to lump and others split. But once this new subspecies has been recognized, it can then have the same full protection under the Endangered Species Act as a bald eagle.

Insects tend to have a smaller range, and often have slight variances based on location. In the case of the Sand Mountain blue butterfly, it has very slight color differences and the size of its genitalia is slightly different from its close cousins. The differences are so slight, that you cannot identify a Sand Mountain blue from the larger family in the field. Are these minor geographical variances worthy of federal protection and the enormous cost associated with protecting it?

The Endangered Species Act has fallen victim to unintended consequences, politics, and counter-productive lawsuits filed by environmental extremists. What was born of a desire to apply American ingenuity to the cause of saving species has become a tool not for species recovery, but for political, ideological, and fundraising goals. It is time to reform the Endangered Species Act, and bring some common sense to species protection, and sensible land use.

http://evolvethought.blogspot.com/2006/04/...conserving.html

Thursday, April 20, 2006
When is a species worth conserving?

It's not often one gets to see a dustup between taxonomists in the media. After all, taxonomy is such a civilised discipline, usually nobody gets killed and hospitalisation is rare. But here, in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, is a piece on a match between Rob Roy Ramey, and Tim King, both field biologists, over the status of a mouse.

What's at issue is its status under the US Endangered Species Act, which focuses on conservation in terms of species rather than ecosystems, biodiversity, or viability of broader ecological systems. Ramey denied that a previously listed endangered species, Preble's meadow jumping mouse (that's some mouse, if it can jump entire meadows!) was in fact a species at all, but rather a subspecific population. King reanalysed the matter and decided that yes it was a species. And what is more, it was intimated, according to the article, that Ramey was "politically tainted" (which is code for, a Republican shill).

I'll get to the politics in a minute, but the taxonomic issues are of interest to me. The article talks about the "lumpers versus splitters" dispute in taxonomy, and wrongly attributes the recognition of this to Darwin (it predates him enormously, probably as long as naturalists have been describing species). A lumper blends variation into single taxa, while a splitter finely discriminates variants into their own taxa. There are lumpers and splitters at all levels of taxonomy, from superkingdoms down to subspecies, but the usual argy bargy is about species. Transitional forms have always been a problem. One anecdote about a student of Agassiz, Nathaniel Shale, tells of him stomping on transitional shells and exclaiming "That's the way to treat a damned transitional form!", in the late nineteenth century. One major problem of the nature of living things is that, well, they vary enormously and over gradients (morphoclines). Drawing the boundaries is tough, and sometimes a matter of convention.

Ramey disputes that the studies are really at odds. He says the differences come down to a question of how one interprets the data and where one chooses to draw lines between species. King draws them extremely finely; Ramey, less so. "What species concept you apply determines how you allocate your resources," Ramey told me. "We have so many things listed and too few resources to get the job done. We could go down the road of saying that every local population segment is a listable subspecies. But can we afford it, and will we be shortchanging arguably more important species? We can end up saving lots of little fish in each creek, and lose those creatures that are really unique."

And here is the problem. It's a matter of triage, due to limited economic resources. But focus on the "species concept" question. There is only one species concept - what is at issue here is the definitions and associated techniques and criteria for identifying a species. With the rise of DNA-based identification techniques, including the much-touted and much-criticised "DNA barcode", it is either the case that the genes used overgroup (lump) or undergroup (split) depending entirely on the evolutionary genetic history of the organisms. So the issue is really which serves the purposes best. In older days, species identification was based on phenotype, or in the older terminology, morphology - body shape, skeleton form, organs, and so on. This was convenient, but despite the mythology you'll find in some texts, it wasn't the whole story - naturalists before the modern period knew very well that there was variation of form, and that the identification keys were just conveniences. But some over-reliance on these techniques, hallowed by time and authority, led to bitter disputes. We see the same things happening today, only based on choices of molecular data rather than phenotype.

But what purposes are served by identifying species in conservation biology? It would seem that species is the focus because there is something objective about species, and so it validates the choices made for conserving biodiversity. If the diagnosis of species is assay-relative, that is, if it depends on what you use as the identification, the choice of assay is crucial. And that choice can be made to serve nonscientific purposes as well as scientific ones.

There is a movement, apparently successful (of which it seems Ramey is a part) to have the ESA rewritten. A movement known as the National Endangered Species Act Reform Coalition has successfully lobbied Congress to allow more political interference and economic considerations in the conservation process. The coalition includes such bodies as

American Farm Bureau Federation
American Forest & Paper Association
American Public Power Association
Colorado River Energy Distributors Association
Edison Electric Institute
Mid-West Electric Consumers Association
National Association of Counties
National Association of Home Builders
The National Grange
National Marine Manufacturers Association
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
National Water Resources Association
Northwest Horticultural Council
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
all of which have vested interests in the outcome. If the Secretary of the Interior can overrule the Parks and Wildlife Service, based on whatever "scientific information" (the new wording of the revised act HR3824, the "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005," which has passed the House of Representatives in the US, and is now before the Senate for ratification), economic interests will come to predominate.

Now this is not entirely a bad thing, for two reasons. First, it is entirely true as Ramey said that limited resources should be used to best conserve ecosystems, and second, that without the full support of the local communities and businesses, conservation is as doomed in the US as it is in the Congo. What worries me is that the tenor of the change indicates that this is not the motivation, but that this is a smokescreen for the undercutting of science that has been seen elsewhere by the present administration. All you have to do is change what is used to identify the species, and you can lump or split to serve political purposes.

Something like the Preble's mouse issue happened once before. The Red Wolf had been listed in 1967 as endangered under an earlier version of the ESA, but it turned out that as numbers declined, they hybridised with the more abundant coyote. A major debate followed, in which it transpired that there were no apparently unique alleles in the Red Wolf, and that it might not be a proper species. The Biological Species Concept was employed by those who argued that it was not a species, since it freely hybridised, so species concepts played a major role in that discussion too.

Part of the problem lies, I believe, in the focus on species. And that is a fundamental problem of the use of various, often arbitrarily chosen, measures of biodiversity. What really matters about biodiversity is the viability of entire ecosystems. At best, individual species are surrogates for that property. But nobody seems to be able to identify what that property really is. The problem is certainly with the ESA and equivalent legislation around the world, but the solution is hard to find. Some think there is no solution - biodiversity is just what we want to conserve in each particular instance. I think there is something worth pursuing here, and I have put in a grant application to follow it up. If it comes through, I'll certainly have more to say about this.

But it's nice to see my favourite species of biologists in the news. Taxonomy matters...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/cc/?id=110008128

Of Mice and Men
A tiny rodent is the hottest political issue in Colorado.

BY STEPHEN MOORE
Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:01 a.m.

DENVER--Here in Colorado, the hottest political issue of the day may not be the war in Iraq or the out-of-control federal budget, but rather the plight of a tiny mouse. Back in 1998, a frisky eight-inch rodent known as the Preble's meadow jumping mouse gained protective status under the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). What has Coloradans hot under the collar is that some 31,000 acres of local government and privately owned land in the state and stretching into Wyoming--an area larger than the District of Columbia--was essentially quarantined from all development so as not to disrupt the mouse's natural habitat. Even the Fish and Wildlife Service concedes that the cost to these land owners could reach $183 million.
What we have here is arguably the most contentious dispute over the economic impact of the ESA since the famous early-'90s clash between the timber industry and the environmentalist lobby over the "endangered" listing of the spotted owl in the Northwest. That dispute eventually forced the closure of nearly 200 mills and the loss of thousands of jobs. Last week the war over the fate of the Preble's mouse escalated when a coalition of enraged homeowners, developers and farmers petitioned the Department of the Interior to have the mouse immediately delisted as "endangered" because of reliance on faulty data.
The property-rights coalition would seem to have a fairly persuasive case based on the latest research on the mouse. It turns out that not only is the mouse not endangered, but it isn't even a unique species.

The man who is almost singlehandedly responsible for exposing the truth about the Preble's mouse is Rob Roy Ramey, a biologist and lifelong conservationist, who used to serve as a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Mr. Ramey's research--published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation--concluded that the Preble's mouse "is not a valid subspecies based on physical features and genetics." The scientist who conducted the original research classifying Preble's as unique now agrees with Mr. Ramey's assessment. Even scientists who defend extending the mouse's "endangered" status admit that it is 99.5% genetically similar to other strains of mice.
Nor is the mouse on the road to extinction. "The more people look for these mice, the more they find. Every time scientists do a new count, we find more of the Preble's mouse," Mr. Ramey says. It's now been found inhabiting twice as many distinct areas as once thought. These are mice, after all, and the one thing rodents are proficient at is breeding. The full species of the meadow jumping mouse, far from being rare, can be found over half the land area of North America.
"The federal government has effectively shut off tens of millions of dollars of economic development," complains coalition spokesman Kent Holsinger, "based on saving a species that we now know doesn't even exist." But green groups and Department of Interior bureaucrats, who regard the ESA as a sacred pact--the modern-day equivalent of Noah's Ark, as former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called it--pledge to fight any change in status.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ramey has been accused of being "dishonest," a "whore for industry" and a "shill for the Bush administration." Under intense political pressure from environmental activists, he was removed from his curator's job at the museum. "I've been nearly stampeded by a herd of agitated elephants in Africa and suspended from some of the highest cliffs in North America, but nothing prepared me for the viciousness of the attacks from the environmentalist lobby," he tells me.
Meanwhile, the Preble's mouse continues to impose huge costs on local communities. One water district in Colorado was recently required to build two tunnels for the mice under a man-made pond to spare the critters the inconvenience of having to scurry around it. Regulators even asked local officials if it would be feasible to grow grass in the tunnels for the mice, which was only slightly less absurd than padding the mouse thoroughfares with red carpet. The extra cost to the water project to make it mouse-friendly? More than $1 million. The Fish and Wildlife Service also has the authority to assess penalties on property owners if they even inadvertently spoil mouse habitat. Owners can even be fined if their cats do what cats do: chase and apprehend mice.
Because of preposterous regulations like there, many land owners resort to extreme measures. A comprehensive 2003 survey found that more than one in four land owners impacted by the Preble's mouse regulation "admitted to actively degrading habitat following the species listing in 1998." This is often precisely what happens in these situations: Because most of 1,500 or so species that have been listed as threatened since 1972 are anything but, people have no respect for the designation and attempt to force the species away from their land. For truly endangered species, the ESA is a disaster.
Many of these land owners have been so strong-armed by federal bureaucrats that they have come to believe--with good reason--that the original and widely supported intent of the ESA has been subverted into a back-door means to slam the brakes on economic development. "It's a cost-free way for the government and the greens to impose land-use control on property owners," says R.J. Smith, an ESA expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Therein lies the crux of the problem. The law tries to achieve the societal policy goal of saving species from extinction by imposing all of the costs on a hapless few. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo has sensibly proposed reforms that allow land owners to get fair compensation from the government if their land is depressed in value due to a wetlands or endangered species designation. That seems equitable: If society wants to preserve habitat for the common good, then the cost should be borne by all taxpayers, not individual land owners, who would no longer regard endangered species as an economic plague on their property.
If anything good can come out of the Preble's mouse fiasco in Colorado, it will be that it has awakened Congress to the reality that the ESA isn't just failing property owners but the very irreplaceable species it was designed to protect.
Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.