It’s too soon to tell, I guess, whether this month’s decision to take more public comment on federal wolf protections will change the policy eventually adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But if you’re inclined to believe, or even just to hope, that sound science still has a role in such decisions — well, this embarrassing episode may be worth a closer look. The picture you’ll see is not pretty.
It’s probably fair to say that wolves are by far the biggest headache that Fish and Wildlife has been handed under the Endangered Species Act. Wolves have had ESA protections for four decades now, and for more than half that time the service has been working actively to shed its responsibilities for these worshipped and detested predators, battling an assortment of national groups at every turn.
What looked like maybe the last of those turns came in June, when FWS announced its plan to end protection of gray wolves throughout the remainder of the lower 48 where authority hadn’t already been turned back to the states.
However, such delisting decisions are legally required to be rooted in the “best available science,” and here the service had a problem: Its primary foundation for this delisting was a single paper laying out a fairly controversial re-classification of wolf species.
One species or two?
That paper, by Steven M. Chambers and three others, came down squarely in favor of seeing North American gray wolves as being of two types:
- Those that have been recovering in the western U.S., with two populations sufficiently robust to justify their delisting in a zone of the northern Rockies and the region covering Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
- Others of a separate “eastern” species that supposedly was native to but is now essentially extinct in 29 states west of the Mississippi.
Plenty of other wolf biologists and animal geneticists think that question is far from settled — and more than a few actually think it has been settled in the opposite direction of Chambers’ conclusion, with all gray wolves belonging to just one species.
The science of these things is complex and technical, as you might expect, rooted in DNA mapping and requiring judgments as to whether DNA differences detected among wolves are permanent or temporary, results of evolutionary divergence or interbreeding convergence, and so on.
But if the differences at the molecular level are tiny, at the policy level they could hardly be larger.
The gray wolf has Endangered Species Act protection until FWS can prove it’s no longer needed; “eastern gray wolves,” if they exist, have never been protected and presumably never will be, since virtually all of the territory that would be considered their natural range has been wolfless for a long, long time.
In another policy decision that has brought sharp criticism recently, FWS has chosen to define the “natural and historic range” of a threatened species as whatever territory it occupied at the time of being listed for protection — not its historic territory. Some critics see this as an effort to rewrite the ESA by recasting its most important definition.
In-house research project
There were some other problems with the Chambers paper, too:
- Chambers is an FWS employee. So are his three collaborators. Their work was published in an FWS journal, “North American Fauna” without peer review. (The paper can be found here.)
- In forming a peer review panel after publication, a private contractor hired by FWS first selected and then de-selected three national wolf experts who had signed a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell expressing doubts about the service’s move toward delisting. (Among the three was John Vucetich, known to MinnPost readers as director of the Isle Royale study of wolf/moose population dynamics.)
FWS claimed at the time that it had no role in the picking and unpicking, but a reporter for MSN News turned up an email in which the three were told by the contractor that, “I understand how frustrating it must be, but we have to go with what the service wants.”
The only way out of the ensuing embarrassment was to halt that review and arrange for a second, this one to be undertaken by five scientists chosen without the service’s knowledge or involvement, and their work was released earlier this month.
It happens that one of the five, Robert Wayne of UCLA, was also among the three bounced from the first panel. But as the panel’s report puts it:
[W]e did not avoid selecting reviewers who had previously made known their personal (as opposed to scientific) opinions on the issue. This distinction is important; it is entirely possible for a scientist to have a strong opinion on policy or a proposed action, but also for that scientist to make an impartial assessment on (for instance) the precise genetics or taxonomic techniques and data that were used.
In any case, the five were assigned to give no thought to the policy aspects of the delisting proposed by FWS but to consider only its scientific basis for making them. And its conclusions are rather stark:
-
There was unanimity among the panelists that, although there was much good scientific work in the Proposed Rule, the rule is heavily dependent upon the analysis of Chambers et al.
-
There was unanimity among the panelists that Chambers et al was not universally accepted and that the issue was “not settled.” The issues raised by Chambers et al could be definitively answered relatively soon
-
There was unanimity among the panel that the rule does not currently represent the “best available science.”
- READ MORE: http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2014/02/feds-postponement-wolf-delisting-follows-embarrassing-scientific-review
===
Photo: wolf-pups_mythwallpaper-com
Posted in: Wolf Wars, Endangered Species Act
Tags gray wolf, shaky science, USFWS, national wolf delisting proposal, please comment, March 27, 2014 deadline, wolf persecution
Boulder White Clouds Council
Exposing The Big Game
Footloose Montana
Friends of the Clearwater
Lockwood Animal Rescue Center
Louise du Toit
LUPUSLAETUS
Mercy For Animals
Northern Idaho Wolf Alliance (NIWA)
Predator Friendly®- Because Wildlife Matters
Project Coyote
Project: Wolf
The Nature Conservancy
The Ravensong Group
WildEarth Guardians
Wisconsin Wildlife Ethic-Vote Our Wildlife
Wolf And Wildlife Studies: Jay Mallonee (Independent Wolf Biologist)
Wolf Song of Alaska
Wolves in english ! Les loups en anglais !
WWP's Gray Wolf Page
Yellowstone To Yukon Conservation Initiative
Howling For Justice 
ACTION ALERT: Stop The Delisting Of The Yellowstone Grizzly – Last Day To Comment!
May 10, 2016
MAY 10th IS THE LAST DAY TO COMMENT!
HAVE YOU COMMENTED YET?
The USFWS is pushing to delist the Yellowstone grizzly bears. It’s obvious why they’re doing this. Trophy hunters are itching for a grizzly bear hunt to satisfy their blood lust and ego’s and the USFWS is perfectly happy to make their dreams come true. Please don’t allow this to happen.
They’re not just after grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem but Montana is already pushing for the delisting of all grizzly bears, specifically the great bear population in Northwest Montana. Please take a moment and speak out for this iconic species. They are voiceless, we must speak for them!
Follow the link to the USFWS comment page and stand up for the grizzly bear. Points to make:
1. Grizzly bears have one of the lowest reproductive rates of any large mammal. That’s because grizzly mothers keep their cubs with them for up to three years. It takes a long time to learn how to be a successful grizzly bear. This means any grizzly bear hunts could quickly decimate their population.
2. Grizzly bears are not recovered across their historic range.
3. Yellowstone grizzlies would be sitting ducks since they are habituated to people. The most famous female grizzly alive, iconic mother grizzly bear number 399, would be threatened by the delisting.
===
The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Proposed Rule: Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants: Removing the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Population of Grizzly Bears from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife
https://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FWS-R6-ES-2016-0042-0001
===
You Can Write a Comment that Helps Save the Grizzly
by Rick Lamplugh
Montana outlines specifics of possible grizzly hunt
Yellowstone grizzly bears face end of endangered species protection
US federal government says recovery of national park population to more than 700 is a ‘historic success’ but conservationists say move is premature
Top Photo: USFWS
Share this:
- Action Alerts
- grizzly bear
- Howling For Justice
on May 10, 2016 at 2:46 am Comments (24)Tags: delisting of Yellowstone grizzlies, Montana, please comment, trophy hunters want to kill bears, USFWS, Wyoming