Changes Proposed to Iowa's Endangered Species List

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is considering changes to the
state Threatened and Endangered Species list. According to a recent Des
Moines Register article, many currently state endangered species will be
downlisted. These changes may diminish protection of biodiversity in Iowa.
**See the Register article below.

The public comment period on the proposal closes on January 8th. To obtain
additional information about animal
species, contact Daryl Howell at (515) 281-8524; <[log in to unmask]>.
To obtain additional information about plant species contact John Pearson
at (515)281-3891; <[log in to unmask]>. When requesting info from the
IDNR leave your name and complete mailing address.

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Tuesday, December 1, 1998
The Des Moines Register

"The economics of extinction"

Should Iowa Protect species that are rare here but abundant elsewhere?

A century ago, settlers on the West Coast declared war on the sea otters.
Naturally, the settlers won, and claimed the spoils;  not just the otters'
fur, but also uncontested rights to harvest the abalone that grew in the
shoreline shallows.  But a funny thing happened on the way to prosperity.

With all the sea otters all but wiped out, the sea urchins multiplied like
mosquitoes in a swamp.  Without the otters to control their population, the
urchins wiped out the kelp and other plants that grew densely in the
shallows.  The ocean floor near the shoreline became the "sea urchin
barrens," and suddenly there was no place for some species of fish to spawn
or for young aquatic animals to hide from predators.

In time, the settlers located some surviving sea otters in the Aleutians to
the far north and along the southern California beaches, and reintroduced
them to their former habitat.  The balance of nature was eventually
restored.

In his 1992 book, "Diversity of Life," Harvard Professor E. O. Wilson uses
the sea otter example in explaining that destroying a single species can
have an impact far beyond what was intended or expected.  The known number
of such examples points up th eimportance of avoiding the potential
catastrophes.

The economic and social costs of our cavalier destruction of nature are
beyond calculation.  The 500 plant and animal species known to have been
hunted or uprooted or trampled to extinction in this country carried myriad
secrets of nature with them.  Most of today's drugs come from plants found
in nature.  But worldwide, we continue to level rainforests and drain
wetlands, wiping out species not yet even identified, and with them,
destroying what could be a mother lode of miracle drugs.

Saving species threatened with extinction is why Congress passed the
Endangered Speices Act in 1974 and has reauthorized it since.  It's why
Iowa biologists are today concerned with the proposed revisions of the
state's endangered-species list, now up for public comment.

John Pearson, botanist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources,
dropped many scarce plants and animals from the list and added some
liverworts and mosses.  His list shifts focus to once-common Iowa plants
whose habitat has been almost completely destroyed.

The list excludes species found in the outer two tiers of counties ----- a
huge share of the state's geography.  The rationale is that species in
those counties will be dropped only if they are found in considerable
numbers in a neighboring state.  That's not good enough.  Shifting
responsibility for preserving a species is no guarantee of protection.

Economic considerations did not influence his decisions, Pearson said. But
concern for rare species is considered by many to be at least a nuisance,
at worst an interference with their field-drainage, or road-building, or
urban-development practices.

On the basis of economics alone, there's a very delicate balance to be
struck between the short-term gain in ignoring the destruction of rare
species, and the long-term loss that such destruction could impose on the
environment.

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