More:
It was suspected at the time that the listing of the snail darter under the ESA was a political move to placate the growing Environmental Movement in the United States. Many activists left without a cause with the ending of the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam had quickly realigned themselves with environmentalism, within a few years following Earth Day in 1970. Challenging the building of a major new dam in Tennessee gave them something to fight against.
Fast forward to earlier this week, to January 03, 2025, and the publication of Comparative species delimitation of a biological conservation icon; Otto et al. 2025.
As explained in the New York Times:
“On Friday, a team of researchers argued that the fish was a phantom all along.”
“There is, technically, no snail darter,” said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.”
“Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.”
Dr. Near, bless his heart, gets a little more honest when he says:
“Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.”“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.”
