Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Save the Gophers


Outdated essays on pocket gophers reveal lack of evidence for ESA listing Posted on December 2, 2014 Written by Melissa Genson, watchdogwire.com Sev­enth in a series on a new ESA list­ing. We will pub­lish addi­tions to the series if/as they are written.

Unsup­ported claims in obscure essays from 1942, 1944, and 1960 have hurt a lot of peo­ple in south Thurston County, Wash­ing­ton.  Oppres­sive laws are based on them—including the 2014 Endan­gered Species Act micro-listing of four Mazama pocket gopher sub­species.  Some fam­i­lies have lost everything.

A brief 1960 essay enti­tled  “Rela­tion­ship of the Pocket Gophers of the Tho­momys Mazama-Talpoides Com­plex in the Pacific North­west” (The Mur­relet, Vol. 41, No. 2, pages 17–22) is what fed­eral, state, and local offi­cials still rely on to iden­tify Thurston County gophers as the Mazama species.   The top of this essay’s first page is shown at right.

This 1960 essay claims that the pocket gophers liv­ing on the prairies around Thurston County are not the same species as the sur­round­ing North­ern (talpoides) pocket gophers—for an intrigu­ing reason. The essay states that, because of the alleged large size of these south Thurston gophers’ penises, they are actu­ally mem­bers of the well-endowed Mazama species.  That species was first dis­cov­ered in 1897 in the moun­tains and forests around Crater Lake, OR and north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, as shown at right.

Crater Lake was formed by the mas­sive erup­tion of Mount Mazama—hence the gopher’s name. The only evi­dence of this 1960 claim are the com­par­a­tive gopher penis draw­ings. There is no avail­able expla­na­tion as to how or why a small band of well-endowed for­est rodents would bur­row 350 miles across moun­tains, val­leys, and rivers, includ­ing the wide Colum­bia, to set­tle on Thurston County prairies, which is a dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent habi­tat from their native moun­tain home. Yet offi­cials at every level of gov­ern­ment fiercely pro­tect the “Mazama” pocket gopher “sub­species” of Thurston County, based on their con­fi­dence in this 54-year-old sketch of gopher penises. Nei­ther Mazama or talpoides need a prairie habitat

Fed­eral, state, and local offi­cials also rely on the 1944 essay, “Dis­tri­b­u­tion and Vari­a­tion in Pocket Gophers, Tho­momys talpoides, in the State of Wash­ing­ton” (Amer­i­can Nat­u­ral­ist, Vol. 77, No.777, pages 308–333), for their sci­en­tific cri­te­ria about pocket gopher habi­tat.  They enforce strin­gent laws based on their asser­tion that pocket gophers can’t live in forests.

This 1944 essay states that Thurston County’s gophers can’t live in forests.  The essay went on to claim that these gophers were even doomed to extinc­tion because of forests encroach­ing on their prairie habi­tat, as shown at right.

This dire pre­dic­tion from 1944 is the basis of these gophers’ cur­rent “endan­gered” status. Mul­ti­ple sci­en­tific stud­ies have doc­u­mented that both the Mazama and the “North­ern” (talpoides) pocket gophers live and breed pro­lif­i­cally in forests.  The North­ern pocket gophers were one of the few old growth for­est ani­mals to sur­vive the erup­tion of Mount St. Helens. So, whichever species Thurston County’s pocket gophers turn out to be–either North­ern or Mazama–they sure don’t need prairie habi­tat to survive.

WDFW chal­lenges ‘sub­species’ criteria Fed­eral, state, and local laws pro­tect­ing Thurston County’s “Mazama” pocket gophers are based on the asser­tion that dis­tinct sub­species were dis­cov­ered by a young museum employee named Wal­ter Dalquest in 1942.

Here is the com­plete two and a half page essay from 1942, claim­ing to iden­tify three new North­ern (talpoides) pocket gopher sub­species in Thurston County.  The essay is fol­lowed by a one page chart of gopher measurements:

1942 Essay – Three New Pocket Gophers (Genus Tho­momys) from West­ern Washington This 1942 essay states that phys­i­cal appearance–varying col­ors, sizes, and shapes–would iden­tify a dis­tinct gopher subspecies. This asser­tion has been refuted by sci­en­tists, who have stated that phys­i­cal appear­ance is deter­mined more by a gopher’s envi­ron­ment, rather than genetics.

This claim has even been refuted by Wash­ing­ton Depart­ment of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) on page 5 their 2013 Draft Mazama Pocket Gopher Sta­tus Update, at right. (Note: On this same page, how­ever, WDFW still appar­ently relies on the 1960 penis draw­ings to iden­tify Thurston County’s gophers as being from the “Mazama” species.)

Even though WDFW rejects this 1942 essay’s under­ly­ing the­ory of what makes a sub­species, the agency still fights, inex­plic­a­bly, to pro­tect “sub­species” that were iden­ti­fied by using this same anti­quated method that they clearly discredit. 1997 DNA tests show no sub­species iden­ti­fied in Thurston County

In 1997, two Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton Zool­o­gists, Eleanor Stein­berg and Dana Heller, pub­lished Using DNA and Rocks to Inter­pret the Tax­on­omy and Patchy Dis­tri­b­u­tion of Pocket Gophers in West­ern Wash­ing­ton Prairies.  In this report, they chal­lenged the 1942 the­ory of mul­ti­ple gopher sub­species in the Thurston County area, for two reasons. On page 44, they dis­puted the 1942 asser­tion that phys­i­cal appear­ance deter­mined a subspecies—just as WDFW did, in 2013. On pages 45–47, Stein­berg and Heller pre­sented the results of DNA tests per­formed on some of Thurston County’s dif­fer­ent “subspecies”—and found no genetic differences. As a result, Stein­berg and Heller asserted that, based on these DNA tests, there was no known evi­dence of pocket gopher sub­species in the area.

This report has not stopped state, local, and fed­eral pro­tec­tion of these unproven “sub­species,” with oppres­sive reg­u­la­tions and threats of crim­i­nal and civil charges. Where’s the proof?

All of these details may explain why WDFW won’t give Rochester real­tor Larry Weaver his gopher blood back, after they sup­pos­edly col­lected it from his prop­erty for genetic research. And these details may explain why Larry Weaver’s son Chris was arrested in 2010 by five armed WDFW offi­cers for admit­ting to trap­ping two gophers on his own property. The five armed WDFW offi­cers took his bar­ren mole traps and his buckets–even though he may not have trapped a pro­tected gopher.

Chris Weaver now has a crim­i­nal record for admit­ting to trap­ping two gophers that may or may not have been pro­tected, with no evi­dence of his crime–thirteen years after the 1997 DNA tests results that showed no sci­en­tific evi­dence of pocket gopher sub­species in Thurston County.

These details may also explain why south Thurston County cit­i­zens face heavy civil and crim­i­nal charges if they trap their own gophers, to have them DNA tested. The Weavers’ gophers may or may not have been a pro­tected “subspecies.” Their gophers may not have been from the ESA-listed Mazama species, from 350 miles away.

Yet the fed­eral gov­ern­ment states that it doesn’t need DNA proof for an ESA list­ing as long as they ref­er­ence an author­ity with lit­tle cred­i­bil­ity, and Wash­ing­ton state can cre­ate sus­pi­cious doc­u­ments to hurt south Thurston County cit­i­zens in the future.

The 1960 gopher penis draw­ings appear to be the only “proof” that the gov­ern­ment has of the Thurston County gophers being mem­bers of the Mazama clan. The 1942 essay appears to be the government’s only “proof” of the exis­tence of sub­species, which was clearly chal­lenged 17 years ago, by the Steinberg-Heller DNA tests.

DNA tests are the only way to val­i­date the results of the 1997 Steinberg-Heller report about no gopher sub­species exist­ing in Thurston County. DNA tests are also the only way to prove whether Thurston County’s pocket gophers are even mem­bers of the far away Mazama species, rather than the sur­round­ing “North­ern” talpoides species.

This is Part 7 of a series about a new ESA micro-listing, and its impact on a rural com­mu­nity in south Thurston County, Wash­ing­ton.  Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here.

Related Posts


at

No comments:

Post a Comment