A Tiny Snail's Big Impact -- The Endangered Species Act -- Little Black Dots In The Water Are Symbols Of Trouble In Idaho

AS CONGRESS DEBATES THE 22-YEAR-OLD ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT THIS SUMMER, A LOOK AT A SMALL SNAIL IN IDAHO SHOWS HOW DIVISIVE THE LAW CAN BECOME.

BRUNEAU, Idaho - Cattle rancher Eric Davis was born and raised in the Bruneau River Valley, but the first time he ever saw a Bruneau hot springsnail was on a visit to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s.

Davis was in Idaho Sen. Jim McClure's office discussing cattle business when McClure picked up a test tube and shook it at Davis. Black dots, the size of BB shot, danced in the formaldehyde.

"Do you know what's special about this snail?" McClure asked.

Davis was about to find out.

On Jan. 25, 1993, those black dots became the 615th species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The snail's tale is a story about how the ESA can be a powerful indicator that the environment is out of whack, how it can protect the tiniest critter in the name of biodiversity, and how it can drive a deep, bitter wedge between urban and rural residents.

It is stories about creatures like the Bruneau snail - and the myths that have grown up around them - that flavor the present debate in Congress and the nation about the future of the Endangered Species Act.

Although the Bruneau snail makes a good story - salt-of-the-Earth farmers battling an unreasonable bureaucracy - the truth lies elsewhere. Ranchers are running out of water in southwest Idaho, and the snail's plight is serving to push the problem to the forefront.

A matter of scarce water

There is only one place in the world to find the Bruneau hot springsnail (the awkward spelling is accurate; it's one of 65 species of springsnails): in seeps and springs along a 5-mile stretch of the rugged Bruneau River as it cuts a deep swath through the high desert south of Boise.

This is one of the most sparsely populated places in the West. About 7.9 inches of rain falls annually. Temperatures plunge below zero in the winter and soar above 100 in the summer.

The military once kept Trident nuclear missiles hidden in the desert a few miles from Bruneau. It exploded a simulated nuclear bomb here, and the mushroom cloud soared high over the desert. Air Force B-15s routinely make bombing runs at the nearby Mountain Home range.

Settled in the 1870s, the Bruneau Valley today is populated by the descendants of pioneer families who turned this place into productive farmland, growing potatoes and sugar beets and raising cattle.

They turned the desert into an oasis by tapping deep wells that bring 140-degree water gushing to the surface from 1,500 feet below ground - water heated by the same geothermal forces that create Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park.

In the 1980s, the water table began dropping here at a drastic rate; springs began drying up, and the snails began disappearing as well. Federal hydrologists thought ranchers were pumping water out of the aquifer faster than it was being replenished.

Around the same time, the deep basalt canyons and the roaring rapids of the Bruneau River were discovered by kayakers and backpackers. They arrived with gleaming kayak gear strapped to 4-wheel-drive vehicles that would never see a day's work on the ranch. Locals called them "recreationists," and it is not a compliment.

Sometimes they left litter behind, caused range fires, shot guns recklessly or left cattle gates open, the ranchers complained. Occasionally they got sick or lost in the desert, and Bruneau's all-volunteer emergency medical technicians had to rescue them.

When the snail was proposed for endangered status, Bruneau residents became suspicious that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had another agenda: The agency wanted to curtail ranch activity and open the area to greater recreation use, since many of the federal employees were kayakers and hikers themselves. Most of the rangeland is federally owned and managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

As Bruneau veterinarian Ted Hoffman puts it, "Recreationists don't want cow pies under their picnic blanket."

And ranchers believed the ESA was sweeping enough to allow environmentalists to use it for that purpose.

The snail became a footnote in the national ESA war of words. On the air, Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey ridiculed it. In print, former President Nixon blasted it.

"Measures designed to protect endangered species such as bears, wolves, and the bald eagle are now being used to force Idaho farmers off their land for the sake of the thumbnail-size (sic) Bruneau hot spring snail . . . ," Nixon wrote in his last book, "Beyond Peace."

In Idaho, it became a symbol for all that is wrong with the Endangered Species Act.

Canary in a coal mine

What a remarkable species, thought Idaho environmentalist Randall Morris when he first encountered Pyrgulopsis bruneauensis, the Bruneau snail.

Its habitat says volumes about a species' ability to find a tiny niche in the ecosystem and make a living there. The snail spends its life grazing on algae growing in 77- to 96-degree water that flows like a sheet over vertical basalt rock faces.

This snail has probably been living in these hot springs since the Pleistocene era 7 million to 12 million years ago, when camels and woolly mammoths roamed Idaho. It is one of the few freshwater mollusks that thrives in hot water.

When scientists visited Indian Bathtub a few miles upriver from Bruneau in the 1960s, water gushed out of the rocks above at the rate of 2,400 gallons a minute and spilled into a bowl-shaped canyon and a deep pool at the bottom. The spring - so named because it was a historic site for the Shoshone tribe - contained tens of thousands of snails clinging to the wet walls of the canyon. As many as 60 snails were counted in a square inch.

Many environmentalists believe it's vital to protect all critters because each contributes something to the overall health of the planet. Snails occupy a bottom rung of the food chain, providing a vital service by grazing on water plants and becoming food for bigger creatures like fish. There are 22 snails and mollusks on the endangered-species list, six of them from Idaho, and many hundreds are candidates for the list.

When the Bruneau snail began disappearing, environmentalists likened it to a canary in a coal mine. Its declineforetold the disappearance of the hot springs, the water and a unique ecosystem that existed precariously at the edge of a desert.

If the snail ran out of water, the Bruneau Valley farmers would run out of water, too - just as surely as the loggers in the Pacific Northwest were eventually going to run out of old-growth trees.

Morris, chairman of the Committee for Idaho's High Desert, suspected several large corporate ranches in the immediate area around Indian Bathtub were at fault for drilling big wells in the 1970s and pumping the area dry.

But when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the snail in 1985, a political battle was joined that lasted nearly a decade. The Idaho Senate delegation successfully delayed the listing until the Idaho Conservation League and the Committee for Idaho's High Desert took legal action. The Fish and Wildife Service made a series of procedural mistakes in following the rules of the ESA. The snail was listed as endangered seven years after it was proposed.

By then, Indian Bathtub had virtually dried up.

More than half the known population of Bruneau hot springsnails perished there in 1990; about 95 percent of the population has perished since the 1960s.

The remaining snails live in 128 seeps and springs along a 5-mile stretch of the river. The location of those springs is a secret. Biologists fear somebody with a gallon of bleach could wipe out all of this snail species on earth in an afternoon.

For the ranchers, the questions flow in an unending stream:

How can the feds take a reliable count of these snails when they're the size of a BB shot? What if it's just not practical to save the snail? Why not gather a few snails and raise them in aquariums? Why not transplant them to other hot springs, getting them out of harm's way?

"If you can transplant wolves and bears, what's wrong with transplanting snails - if your motive is truly to save the species?" rancher Davis asks.

Four months after the snail was listed as endangered, the Bruneau Valley Coalition and Owyhee County Commissioners sued the federal government. On Dec. 14, 1993, U.S. District Judge Harold Ryan in Boise removed the snail from the endangered-species list.

In his ruling, Ryan called the listing "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law." It is the first time a species has ever been removed from the endangered list by court action.

Bruneau residents have put their faith in Roy Mink, director of the Idaho Water Institute at the University of Idaho who has studied the Bruneau Valley aquifer. Surprisingly, Mink also thinks that better management of the aquifer must be part of the solution. It's not a message people in Bruneau want to hear, Mink concedes.

"As I've told the coalition, they are going to have to use more efficient irrigation practices," Mink said. "It's not going to be a nice, simple solution. . . . There are people there who don't want to change."

Mink thinks the Endangered Species Act is playing an important role in the Bruneau Valley. Although initially polarizing, the ESA has "started to get people to come together."

Rick Johnson, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League, said that without the ESA Bruneau residents would have ignored the water crisis. Although an Idaho law prohibits taking more water out of an aquifer than is replenished every year through rainfall and snow melt, Johnson said environmentalists were able to force local officials to take action only by invoking the ESA.

Johnson, for one, is sympathetic with the ranchers. "These are the people who settled the West," he said. "When ranches go, subdivisions come, and frankly, I'd rather see the ranches."

Boise-area environmentalists appealed the judge's ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Two weeks ago, the 9th Circuit reversed the lower court's decision, declared that the Fish and Wildlife Service's action was not arbitrary and capricious, and put the snail back on the list.

The week before Memorial Day, ranchers Eric Davis, Sherry Colyer and Cindy Bachman climbed down into Indian Bathtub and discovered somebody had constructed a crude, 2-foot-high dam of sand, causing a thin trickle of rainwater to pool in the spring.

It was a dilemma for the local people. On the one hand, they should probably call the Fish and Wildlife Service to report the damage. On the other hand, the feds might think they did it.

In the end, they did nothing.

"You can read all the mistrust in it you want to," Davis said, backing away from the dam. "And that's the hell of it. It's mutual."

Tomorrow: The golden-cheeked warbler. When the ESA meets suburbia, feathers fly.

THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT: TWO FACTS THAT MIGHT SURPRISE YOU. ------------------------------------------

1. It isn't responsible for the big drop in logging on Northwest national forests. The environmentalist spotted-owl lawsuits that led to U.S. District Judge William Dwyer's three-year logging injunction that led, in turn, to President Clinton's Northwest forest plan were based not on the ESA, but on two other environmental laws: the National Environmental Policy Act and National Forest Management Act.

The outcome would have been little different if the ESA had never been written.

The ESA has affected logging on many state and private lands, however.

2. The ESA already takes economics into account. The real issue is, how effectively?

Congress has injected economic considerations into the law several times since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1978 ruling that the tiny snail darter could indeed block the nearly complete Tellico Dam in Tennessee.

Federal agencies already can, and sometimes do, exclude land from the "critical habitat" they designate for species if they determine economic costs are too great. A cabinet-level "Endangered Species Committee" can exempt projects from ESA restrictions on economic grounds, even if extinction results.

And the government can issue permits to private landowners for activities likely to harm or kill protected creatures, provided an alternate plan for protecting habitat is in place.

ESA critics argue those provisions haven't worked, that the law remains unbalanced. The Endangered Species Committee, for instance, has convened just three times, and exempted a project just once.

AN ESA GLOSSARY ------------------------------------- Endangered: In danger of extinction.

Threatened: In danger of becoming endangered. Threatened species enjoy almost identical protection to endangered species under ESA rules.

Species: Species, sub-species or, for vertebrates, a "distinct population segment."

Take: What you can't do to a threatened or endangered species. Definition includes harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, collect. Doesn't apply to plants on private land.

Harm: Interpreted by government to include logging, development and other habitat modification. Definition recently upheld by U.S. Supreme Court.

Incidental take permit: Document government can issue that allows "take" if it's incidental to otherwise lawful activity, and if habitat conservation plan for protecting species has been approved.

Critical habitat: Lands considered essential to conservation of listed species. ESA says critical habitat to be designated at time of listing. Rarely occurs in practice. In Washington, only spotted owl has critical habitat.

Consultation: Process all federal agencies must follow to ensure their actions - land management activities, licenses, permits, etc. - don't jeopardize existence of listed species or damage critical habitat. Consultation can be "informal" if agency and Fish and Wildlife Service concur action won't affect species, "formal" if it might. Informal consultations far more numerous.

Biological opinion: What the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service issues at conclusion of formal consultation.

Jeopardy opinion: Biological opinion that concludes project will jeopardize species or damage critical habitat. Rare. Can effectively veto a project, although agencies issuing opinions usually offer alternatives that would not result in jeopardy.

Endangered Species Committee, aka "God Squad": Cabinet-level panel that can overrule jeopardy opinions, even if extinction results.

Recovery plan: Government document that spells out what should be done to get species "downlisted" from endangered to threatened, or "delisted" altogether. Nearly half of 955 listed species still have no recovery plans.

THE ESA: SUCCESS OR FAILURE? ------------------------------------

Depends on your criteria. If it's recovery of listed species, the ESA is a flop. In the 22 years since Congress passed the law, just six species have been "delisted" because they have recovered. The gray whale probably is the most prominent.

Meanwhile, 273 new species have been listed in just the past three years.

But only eight species have been taken off the list because they have gone extinct. In a 1992 report (the most recent available), the Fish and Wildlife Service said the condition of 38 percent of all listed species either had improved or stabilized. "The ESA has successfully prevented some species from becoming extinct . . . " the National Academy of Sciences concluded recently.

However, it added, "the ESA cannot by itself prevent all species extinctions," especially as human population and resource consumption increases.