Opinion by Kip Hansen — 7 January 2025 – 750 words/3 minutes
“Swim Swim Swim. Blub Blub Blub. The little fish swam along the river. He was a happy little fish.”
And this little fish was very proud. All by itself, just by swimming along in the Little Tennessee River, the happy little fish stopped the creation of the Tellico Reservoir – for six long years.
This is one of the seminal stories of the great Environmental Movement of the 1970s . And one of the many stories of the destructive overreach of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency.
The Snail Darter, then Percina tanasi was claimed by the EPA to be an Endangered Species. It was listed on October 9, 1975 for the specific purpose of preventing the completion of the Tellico Dam which was claimed to present a threat to the continued existence of the Snail Darter — if the dam was built the Snail Darter would go extinct.
Years of legal challenges, all the way to the Supreme Court, delayed the completion of the dam. Finally, legislative efforts resulted in President Jimmy Carter signing a bill that exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act on September 25, 1979. The bill, proposed by Senator Howard Baker, exempted the Snail Darter from the provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The episode is discussed in a Wiki article Snail darter controversy – I have no idea how accurate the article is or if it is biased in any particular direction. Only now, fifty years later, do the real facts become known.
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.”
The environmental movement points to a book “The Snail Darter and the Dam” by Zygmunt J. B. Plater:
“The untold story of a notorious environmental case and the citizen crusade that carried a little fish through Washington politics and the Supreme Court
Even today, thirty years after the legal battles to save the endangered snail darter, the little fish that blocked completion of a TVA dam is still invoked as an icon of leftist extremism and governmental foolishness. In this eye-opening book, the lawyer who with his students fought and won the Supreme Court case—known officially as Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill—tells the hidden story behind one of the nation’s most significant environmental law battles.”
It tells the story of brave “the little fish that could”.
But you see, just like The Little Train That Could, the Little Fish was, all along, a fiction.
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Author’s Comment:
A cautionary tale – perk your ears up, turn your Critical Thinking knob up to full, whenever you hear of some species or other being declared a new species or a new subspecies – such as is being done with the giraffes. Some of these decisions may be being made to bolster conservation claims leading to declarations of Endangered Species status.
The are far more species that are unknown to mankind than have been ‘discovered’ , described and assigned names. How many may be disappearing every year and how many are coming into existence as new species is unknown.
I have my doubts about the whole species thing.
Thanks for reading.
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