Fish and Wildlife denies protection for 25 species
WASHINGTON — The federal Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday declined 25 separate petitions to list a variety of species as endangered or threatened, including the Florida Keys mole skink, a subspecies of lizard that lives on beaches and in coastal forests that face rising seas and were just swept by Hurricane Irma.
The service determined that while the skink’s habitat could shrink by as much as 44 percent at the high end, most of the habitat and soils that the species needs “will remain into the foreseeable future,” at least out to the year 2060.
Other rejected listings included Bicknell’s thrush, a songbird that lives at high mountain altitudes; the Big Blue Springs cave crayfish; and the Kirtland’s snake. Fourteen separate species of Nevada springsnails were also rejected for listing.
“In making these 12-month findings, we considered and thoroughly evaluated the best scientific and commercial information available regarding the past, present, and future stressors and threats,” the agency wrote.
Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, noted that the agency has proposed to list a number of fish species, including the small but colorful candy darter, which lives in parts of Virginia and West Virginia.
But at least one environmental group thinks the petitions are being rejected too cavalierly.
“There’s a lot of opposition to endangered species protections within the Department of Interior, and this kind of blanket rejection for all these species just really highlights that,” said Noah Greenwald, who heads the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity, which requested a number of the species listings.
Greenwald said the Fish and Wildlife Service actually had to make decisions about 62 possible listings by the end of September. He said that 29 have been rejected, six species were protected, and six decisions have been delayed thus far. Twenty-one more decisions are yet to come.
President Trump has not yet nominated a director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged with many endangered-species decisions. Others are made by the National Marine Fisheries Service of the Department of Commerce.
The Fish and Wildlife Service also defended its decision not to protect the high-profile Pacific walrus, which is contending with sharp climate change trends in the Arctic where it spends much of its life atop floes of floating sea ice.