Going Catatonic

Eller says he was told to rewrite his biological opinion for Winding Cypress with a "positive" spin and that, when he refused, it was rewritten for him. Recently, when he has set out to write jeopardy opinions, he says he's been told that it's Bush administration policy that they don't get written for any species. Eller's real trouble began after June 25, 2002, the day The Washington Post quoted him as calling the nonenforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act "heinous." His work before that had always been lauded with good performance reviews; it even earned him a major award from the Collier County Audubon Society. After June 25, 2002, however, he metamorphosed into a slacker, at least according to his superiors. Eller was taken off panthers, placed on a "performance improvement plan," and suspended for five days, allegedly for being late with a biological opinion. "They backdated the start of consultation and gave me roughly 60 days to do what normally takes 135 days," he says.

In January 2004 he was suspended for 14 days, allegedly for being discourteous to a developer's consultant who, according to written testimony by other biologists, had a reputation for being "difficult" and "demanding," and had even threatened a libel suit. According to FWS documents written before anyone could have talked to Eller about the complaint, Eller was said to have been guilty of "verbal abuse," and the consultant had been given an apology for his "actions." But Eller is fighting back. On May 4, 2004, he and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a joint complaint under the Data Quality Act of 2000, which requires federal agencies to ensure and maximize "the quality, objectivity and integrity of information" on which they base management. On July 13, Eller was informed in writing that he would be terminated within 30 days.

Half an hour into our flight the wounds faded and we banked east into agricultural land, mostly orange groves. The conservation strategy by which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission jointly manage panthers assumes that they avoid agricultural lands; therefore no compensation is required when developers convert them to malls, golf courses, and housing units. ("We can make more money growing Yankees," the farmers like to say.) But panthers depend heavily on ag lands. The conservation strategy, based on daytime telemetry data from the early 1990s, assumes that panthers are restricted to forests. But panthers are nocturnal; they bed down in forests to avoid daytime heat, then range broadly through open country at night. The conservation strategy is a developer's dream, reducing compensation by throwing out not just ag lands but forest patches smaller than two square miles. It even throws out forest patches of any size more than 90 meters from another forest, based on the ludicrous fiction that cat behavior doesn't change after sunset. There is no "academic disagreement" here. The scientific community is virtually unanimous in condemning the conservation strategy as a prescription for panther extinction. Yet politicians and developers parade it around, propping it up by the waist, arms, shoulders, and neck, as if it were Leonid Brezhnev.

At length the orange groves gave way to cattle range—open grasslands interspersed with clumps of live oaks and cabbage palms, far more valuable to panthers. But the conservation strategy also absolves developers of providing any compensation when they hack this up. The conservation strategy defines cattle range as "avoided habitat," a term developers quickly seize upon. But it's "avoided" only by day.

From cattle range we swung south over the Big Cypress National Preserve, wet woods of dwarf cypress with taller trees on scattered domes. At Route 75—"Alligator Alley"—Eller pointed out a panther "undercrossing." Highways are probably the second biggest source of panther mortality, after the cats themselves, which kill other cats in defense of shrinking territories.

The underpasses have helped. So has habitat acquisition by the state. But what has made panther recovery biologically feasible is the injection of genes from eight Texas females released in 1995 into a population so inbred that extinction seemed imminent. At the time most Florida panthers had low sperm counts, deformed sperm, poor sperm motility, undescended testicles, cowlicks, heart problems, and right crooks at the tips of their tails. Today the cats have none of those defects. They're bigger and more vigorous. Now when biologists tree them with hounds, they don't crouch and snarl; they leap wildly from tree to tree. In nine years the population has more than doubled. The conservation strategy considers everything in Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades south of Route 75 "marginal habitat," but now almost half the panther population occurs there. Before development isolated them, Florida panthers exchanged genes with Texas cats, so "gene-pool pollution" isn't a concern.

Panthers are just a little part of what makes panther country so special. They're an "umbrella species." That is, you can't have them without having most everything else.

"Genetic restoration is an enormous success story that hasn't been told," remarks Jane Comiskey of the University of Tennessee, one of the scientists appointed by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1999 to a nine-person team charged with drafting a new conservation strategy. "This is at a time when only 9 percent of endangered species are showing improvement and usually for reasons not related to intervention." The fact that panther recovery is now feasible biologically, and isn't happening, is precisely what Comiskey, Eller, and Richardson find so maddening.