Sturgeons get a needed break

Sturgeons are these really cool, prehistoric creatures.  They date back 200 million years in the fossil record with relatively little morphological change making them kind of like living dinosaurs.    

       Photo by Ken Bouc, Nebraska Game & Parks Commission; courtesy USFWS

These bottom feeding fish spend much of their lives in rivers and river deltas taking their time to grow into their long (some up to 18 feet!), reproductively mature selves.  Because of their slow life cycle, though, changes to their habitat as well as exploitation of these fish for meat and caviar have led most species of sturgeon to become endangered. 

Last year, NRDC petitioned to have the Atlantic sturgeon added to the endangered species list and the National Marine Fisheries Service is now in the process of conducting a review.  Despite a fishing moratorium for Atlantic sturgeon that went into effect in 1998, the species is continuing to decline because it is still caught as bycatch in other fisheries and its habitat has been drastically altered, for example, due to damming, dredging and pollution.

Similarly, the pallid sturgeon, which is found in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, is another species that has become critically endangered due largely to habitat changes from damming and channeling of the Mississippi River.  After 20 years on the endangered species list, the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that the pallid sturgeon was not significantly improving in part because despite harvest limitations, pallid sturgeon were still often caught in the shovelnose sturgeon fishery either as bycatch or because they were misidentified especially as young.

                                                       Photo credit: USGS

In response, the US Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced that it will be applying endangered species protections to shovelnose sturgeon as well in the area of its range where it overlaps with pallid sturgeon due to its ‘similarity of appearance.’  This is great news and a necessary move for the pallid sturgeon as it struggles to recover. 

It is also likely to be good news for the shovelnose sturgeon which has seen some local declines and whose range-wide status is currently unknown.  We believe that the shovelnose sturgeon deserves its own evaluation to make sure that it too is not in jeopardy, but at the very least it will be important to keep a close eye on the subsequent harvest levels to ensure that the added protection in one portion of its range doesn’t simply intensify fishing pressure in the remaining portion of its range.

With some responsible management, however, this added protection should give both the pallid sturgeon and the shovelnose sturgeon some needed breathing room as they attempt to continue their 200 million year adventure on this planet.

Wildlife Roundup: The Good News

A little bit of August good news about wildlife conservation from around the world:

• A pair of Persian onagers (a type of wild horse) were born in Cumberland Ohio, as the result of artificial insemination.  There are only about 700 Persian onagers left in the wild, and less than 100 in captivity.  The births are being hailed as a major step forward both for wild equine breeding and, more importantly, the future prospects of this highly endangered species.  
• Myanmar (that’s Burma to you and me) has created the world’s largest tiger reserve by setting aside the entire Hukaung Valley, 8,000 square miles of habitat.  Scientists believe that over 100 tigers may live there.
• Wolves were put back on the list of endangered species after conservation groups (including NRDC) won a court case rejecting a decision to strip them of federal protections.  The court rejected an attempt to “delist” the wolf in Idaho and Montana until the entire northern Rocky Mountain population is secure.  Right now about 1,700 gray wolves roam the wilds of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, and wolves have also established small populations in Oregon and Washington.
• Cranes—the common crane, to be exact—are about to be reintroduced into England, after an absence of over 400 years.  According to The Telegraph, the last public record of cranes in England was in an Act of Parliament from 1583.  Twenty-one common cranes, after being hand reared in a facility at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre, are going to be placed in an enclosure in the Somerset Levels, before being released into the wild, in September.
• Cranes aren’t the only long-absent wildlife making a comeback in the UK.  Scotland's Kintyre Peninsula has seen the first beaver born in the wild in Britain, also in 400 years.  The animals were reintroduced to the Scottland last May. (h/t Yale 360)
• Kihansi spray toads have evolved to fill a narrow niche: their natural habitat is the mist of waterfalls (how cool is that?).  The toads were native to just five acres of land in Tanzania and were completely wiped out in the wild by development.  Luckily, they were bred in captivity by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Toledo Zoo.  Now, scientists have reintroduced them to Tanzania.
• It’s also been a pretty good month for frogs.  The world’s smallest frog was just discovered in Borneo. The frog, which is only about the size of a pea, lives on pitcher plants. Closer to home, in Riverside County, California, scientists released 36 endangered mountain yellow-legged frog tadpoles into a stream near Idyllwild. In Arizona, scientists released 1,700 threatened Chiricahua leopard frogs into the Tonto National Forest.

Take Action to Protect Idaho's Wolves

Earlier this month, Wildlife Services, a misleadingly named agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (its primary “service” when it comes to wildlife is “lethal removal”), issued a Draft Environmental Assessment (“Draft EA”) regarding its involvement in the management of gray wolves in Idaho.

Ultimately, Wildlife Services is proposing to help the State of Idaho reduce its wolf population by roughly 40% -- from around 843 wolves to about 500.  This high level of killing is predicated upon, among other things, an alleged need to protect livestock, increase elk and deer numbers, protect human safety, and prevent the transmission of disease.

When you dig into the meat of the Draft EA, however, many of the bases for preemptively killing over 300 wolves melt away.

Wolf conflicts with livestock make up a miniscule percentage of livestock losses, and several nonlethal methods to prevent conflicts exist.  In the Draft EA, Wildlife Services fails to consider the full range of nonlethal practices available, draws hasty conclusions about the effectiveness of many techniques, and neglects to mention others altogether.

Regarding elk, the premier big-game species in the West, an Idaho Fish & Game Newsletter released just a few weeks ago discusses the effect of predators on elk in Idaho.  Contrary to the popular myth that wolves are singlehandedly devastating elk herds across the Northern Rockies, Idaho Fish & Game reports that only a minority of elk populations in Idaho are declining -- and wolves are only the primary cause of elk deaths in a few of them.  In fact, 23 of Idaho’s 29 elk zones are above or within management population objectives.  And the report explains that other factors -- habitat conditions, weather, and hunter harvest -- also play a huge role in elk numbers.

As for human safety, the Draft EA expressly states, “There are no verified instances of wolves having attacked and seriously injured people in the lower 48 United States.”  The threat posed to humans by wild wolves is basically nonexistent.  If, on the other hand, a wild wolf, in an extremely rare case, becomes habituated in some way and begins to exhibit threatening or unusual behavior, such an animal can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.  Yellowstone National Park, for example, receives over 3 million visitors annually, many of them camping, backpacking, fishing, hiking, etc.  In May 2009, Yellowstone, for the first time since it reintroduced wolves in 1995, euthanized a wolf that had become habituated (likely food-conditioned) and was exhibiting abnormal behavior.  Removing the odd wolf in Idaho that becomes habituated, should it occur, makes sense; justifying reducing wolf numbers based on a threat to human health does not.

With disease transmission, reducing Idaho’s wolf population would do nothing to reduce the spread of disease to livestock, domestic dogs, other wildlife, or humans.  In fact, conspicuously absent from Wildlife Services’s discussion of disease transmission in the Draft EA is any mention of chronic wasting disease (“CWD”), a horrible wildlife disease moving west.  Had Wildlife Services analyzed the potential effect of wolves on CWD, it would have found that multiple wildlife experts think wolves will help stop the spread of CWD as it moves farther west.  According to Doug Smith, the legendary Yellowstone wolf biologist, “Wolves are probably the single best way to stop the spread of CWD.”

The Draft EA is flawed in other ways as well (see here for NRDC’s full comment letter), and because the widespread reduction of wolves in Idaho will have a significant effect on the environment, Wildlife Services, pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act, must withdraw the Draft EA and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement.

Wildlife Services is seeking public comments on the Draft EA through today, August 31st.

Please stand up for Idaho’s wolves and send a message to Wildlife Services to go back to the drawing board and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement.

(Gray wolf photo credit: Tracy Brooks / Mission Wolf / USFWS)