TUCSON (CN) — Environmentalists sued the federal government Tuesday over reduced critical habitat protections for two endangered species of garter snake native to the Southwest.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed in 2013 that both the northern Mexican and narrow headed garter snakes be allocated more than 630,000 acres of protected land before they were officially declared endangered in 2014. That proposal was never finalized though, and the Center for Biological Diversity says the more than 90% reduction finalized in 2021 violates the Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“Fish and Wildlife officials are once again choosing to protect the interests of ranchers, developers and the Arizona Game and Fish Department at the expense of endangered species,” center cofounder Robin Silver said in a Tuesday press release “To serve their priority patrons, these federal officials are ignoring the survival and recovery of endangered plants and animals in spite of what science and the law requires.
Both snakes occupy perennial and ephemeral streams and wetlands across Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico. The northern Mexican garter snake received 20,326 acres of protected land — a 95% reduction from its proposed 421,423 acres. The narrow headed garter snake received 23,785 acres — an 89% reduction from its proposed 210,289 acres.
The center says in the complaint that Fish and Wildlife ignored snake experts and its own scientists in shrinking the snakes’ protected habitat by excluding thousands of acres of ephemeral streams among other actions the center says were inconsistent with “the best available science.”
It asks the court to remand both critical habitat designations to the agency for revisions and implementation by a yet-to-be-determined date.
“I’m hopeful that a judge will force Fish and Wildlife to follow the law and protect these rare aquatic snakes from extinction,” Silver said.
To support its revised critical habitat designation, Fish and Wildlife made three changes to a list of physical and biological features that the center says are unsupported by science.
The agency determined that the snakes only inhabit streams that flow year-round, excluding any ephemeral streams that don’t lie directly between perennial stretches of water. It also excluded overland areas between perennial stream systems that the snakes often use to move between aquatic areas for certain life-cycle functions like overwintering and reproduction. Finally, it required an absence of non-native species, ruling out thousands of acres of land dominated by invasive species like frogs and fish.
Both the center and professor Erika Nowak, director of Northern Arizona University’s garter snake research project whose work Fish and Wildlife cited in creating the designations, repeatedly objected to the agency’s decisions and were largely ignored, according to court documents.
The agency also moved the goalpost for determining whether a particular area is occupied. Before, any area with a snake detected in 1980 or later could be considered occupied. But Fish and Wildlife changed the cutoff year to 1998, reasoning that garter snakes live only 15 years.
Nowak warned the agency that the “secretive, difficult to detect,” snakes shouldn’t be ruled out of habitats so soon.
“It does not seem reasonable to conclude that streams that were not documented as occupied at the time of listing are truly not occupied,” she wrote in a letter to Fish and Wildlife. “Instead, given the cryptic nature of both species, a current lack of documented occupancy may be more of a reflection of incomplete survey effort than of true non-occupancy.”
Under the 2013 proposed rule, an entire stream would be protected if it contains record of at least one snake and at least one native prey. But the 2021 revision protects only 2.2 miles both up and downstream “from a known garter snake observation record.”
The center called the move “a rigid interpretation of individual snake movements, rather than the population at large.”
Nowak added that it wouldn't make sense for a population of snakes to use only portions of a stream rather than its entirety.
Fish and Wildlife declined to comment.
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