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Two species of tiny, drab, and otherwise forgettable fish—the spotted brown darter snail and the pale, silvery delta smelt—will never meet in real life. The darter snail swims in rivers and streams in the southern United States, and the delta smelt can only be found in a single estuary in California. But fish have more in common than you think. Both dart snails and delta smelt are freshwater fish native to the U.S. Both species have been listed as endangered at one time and subsequently became the lodestar of a controversial conservation battle. And both fish are in the news this week.
These two species collided in the news for seemingly different reasons: the darter starred in a new article arguing that it is not actually a distinct species, and the smelt had the misfortune of becoming the subject of a tenuously coherent response from Donald Trump to a question about the Los Angeles wildfires. Two strange little fish making national headlines in one week may seem like a coincidence, but these fish are more tangled than you’d ever imagine. (How would they know? They’re fish.) They tell a story about the process of science and conservation, and how innocent species become scapegoats for the quagmires we ourselves have created.
Little maligned Fish No. 1: The Dart Snail
For millennia, the darter snail swam in the Little Tennessee River looking like gravel and eating snails (hence its name), without people noticing or caring. The fish grows about the width of a hockey puck, which meant it wasn’t a fish anyone particularly wanted to eat. “I really love seeing the look on someone’s face when they see one live for the first time,” said Katrina Liebich, public affairs specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, on an episode of the Fish podcast. of the Week. ! “They say, ‘Is that it? Really? That’s it?’ ‘Yes, that’s it.'”
In 1967, the Tennessee Valley Authority began building a multimillion-dollar dam on Little Tennessee, which would transform the free-flowing river into a man-made reservoir. While the dam was under construction, “many people, mostly locals, had been fighting the construction of Tellico Dam,” wrote Chris Nagano, a retired USFWS endangered species biologist in a post about the darter snail. in your Substack. For example, the dam project would have forcibly evicted farmers from their land and flooded Cherokee ancestral sites.
In 1973, the Endangered Species Act became law. That same year, a University of Tennessee biologist named David Etnier found a spotted brown darter at the bottom of the Little Tennessee River. Etnier had never seen this fish before and would describe it as a new species: percina tanasior the snail dart. Environmentalists realized that this rare fish, which was only found in the path of the dam, could be their best battering ram against the construction. In 1975, the darter was listed as an endangered species.
The fish earned the ignominious honor of becoming the face of the anti-dam fight, which many people reduced to extreme, overreaching environmentalists exploiting a tiny fish for their own goals: “How do we allow this 2-inch fish for no benefit “How important is it to delay a billion-dollar dam project that would have provided energy and jobs to people?” RFK Jr. once told a reporter while standing over the decomposing body of a fox he had recently killed.
The reality was much more complicated. The dam was small and did not need electricity, NPR reported. And the darter snail was obviously not the only species that would be endangered by its construction, but only the one that offered the best legal case against the dam. “Depending on how you look at it, the dart dam conflict was either an inappropriate and unbalanced campaign by self-proclaimed crusaders who abused a tiny fish to serve their own obstructionist ends, or it is an instructive saga of amateur citizens carrying a tiny fish. endangered as a warning symbol, a canary in the coal mine,” Zygmunt Plater, the lawyer who sued to protect the dart, wrote in an article. Plater took the case to the Supreme Court and won, but Jimmy Carter ended up exempting the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act, resulting in an operational dam in 1979.
Fast forward to this week, when a group of Yale researchers published a paper in Current biology arguing that the snail launches, percina tanasiIt was never really its own species, not even a subspecies. Instead, the fish is simply another population of a fish called the stargazer darter, which is not endangered. He New York Times quoted one of the authors: “Technically, there is no such thing as a snail dart.” And this led to a series of stories declaring that the snail “isn’t real” or that the decades-long scam by environmentalists was “finally debunked.”
This is nonsense. The darters swimming in the rivers of Little Tennessee have not disappeared, nor have the unique problems facing this population. And the concept of what exactly constitutes a species is and has been hotly debated for a long time by people who are actually experts on the subject. How much does genetics, appearance or geography matter? This has led to one of the great rivalries in science: those who group against those who divide. Groupers group species; the divider broke them. In it Times In the story about the new snail darter paper, Dr. Plater accused one of the authors of “lumping.” In turn, that author said that “being described as a ‘lumper’ was a pejorative in his world.”
Fortunately, we currently don’t have the time or interest in deciding whether “lumper” is an insult. But despite how many people are framing the snail saga, this new article is not a tell-all expose of an old environmental scam. Rather, it is a reflection on the fact that science is a process that develops over years and consists of different approaches.
Perhaps most importantly, the fish formerly known as the snail is doing very well. In 2022, the population was officially removed from the threatened species list, in part due to human interventions that routinely add fresh oxygen to the darters’ dammed environment and clear the gravel where they spawn, NPR reported. If anything, it is a sign that species can recover when their existence is valued and the government takes steps to protect them, a practice that will deteriorate over the next four years, it is suspected.
Maligned Minnow #2: Delta Smelt
Speaking about the next four years, Donald Trump invoked the other widely hated minnows of the moment after a reporter asked him if Trump believed federal aid should be provided to California to prevent the destruction of wildfires, which have killed at least 10 people. so far and forced more than 100,000 to evacuate. Trump, in turn, suggested there could be “tremendous water” in California if it weren’t for the delta. The president-elect said: “Because they are trying to protect a tiny little fish, which, by the way, in other areas is called a smelt, and because of the smelt they don’t have water. They didn’t have water.” “On the fire hydrants today in Los Angeles, it’s a terrible thing.”
Aside from the fact that “for the sake of a smelt” is a charming expression, Trump’s blaming an innocent fish for the spread of the wildfire (its most distinctive quality appears to be that it smells like cucumbers) evokes the same anger. out of place. people once headed towards the dart snail. Trump actually has a long-standing problem with the delta smelt, a fish he’s been railing against for almost 10 years. But why?
Delta smelts, which grow just under five inches long, are silvery but otherwise forgettable fish that are only found in the San Francisco Estuary, which is primarily in Northern California and nowhere near Los Angeles. . But the smelt is as controversial as the dart snail. In the 1970s, the delta smelt was abundant, swimming around the cool, murky wetlands, feeding on plankton, and serving honorably as prey to salmon, people, and other predators. The population plummeted in the 1980s, and the smelt would first be listed as threatened under the ESA in 1993 and then again listed as endangered in 2009.
Unfortunately, the delta’s problem is not as unique as a dam, but rather the biggest problem facing California: water. The state relies on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for fresh water, but over the years that water has been diverted to cities and farms, draining wetlands and marshes that were once habitat for smelt and many other species. But the smelt alone became an easy scapegoat for California’s water problem, “because it’s the first fish listed as endangered in the delta and because it’s easy to dislike. Nobody ever sees it. Nobody ever sees it. Nobody fishes it. No, I don’t really have a lobby,” explained science writer Sharon Levy in a podcast for dark.
Trump first mocked the hapless meltdown in 2016 in Fresno. His people loved the smell of hate, so the fish became one of their favorite punching bags, E&E News reported. His big promise: undoing all delta protections would solve all of California’s water problems. This is as false as his claim that the delta is behind the shortage of water available to Los Angeles firefighters. The Los Angeles fires, which broke out outside the traditional wildfire season, were fueled by dry winds, warm temperatures and unrelenting drought, conditions that will only worsen with climate change, scientists told Reuters. Los Angeles’ hydrant system is designed to put out house fires, not wildfires that devour neighborhoods at once. But accusing smelt allows Trump to not only continue denying the effects of climate change, but also to blame some of the few environmental protections we have—indeed, blaming environmentalists for the wildfires.
There is another, arguably more majestic, delta fish that is endangered by the same threats as the smelt: Chinook salmon. The salmon swims in the same estuary as the smelt, but it has the particularity of being a species of commercial and culinary value. “The practical implications of protecting Chinook salmon and the Delta Smelt are virtually indistinguishable,” Caleb Scoville, a sociologist at Tufts University, wrote in a blog accompanying an article on the Delta Smelt controversy. But Trump would never blame wildfires on a beloved fish like salmon because he couldn’t characterize it as small and useless. And I would never blame people like billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who use more water than all the homes in Los Angeles combined, it was reported. Mother Jones.
So where did it smell like? They are practically extinct in the wild. No one from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has caught one since 2017. Soon there will be no delta to blame, and then Republicans will have to find another scapegoat. Fortunately for them, researchers estimate that 83 percent of California’s native freshwater fish are at risk of extinction. Perhaps the next to go will be their cousins, the threatened longfin smelt. And when they are gone, it will be time for rainbow trout and then Chinook salmon. By then, the fires will only get worse.
