Who Needs Grayling?

The service spent three years reviewing the fishes' status, then determined (as it had done in 1982) that they indeed constituted a distinct population segment. It went on to state that listing was "warranted but precluded," meaning basically: "Good idea but we're too busy." The agency reviewed the status of Montana's fluvial grayling twice more, both times concluding that they constituted a distinct population segment.

No sane, sober, honest researcher could possibly have concluded otherwise. After all, these fluvial grayling comprise the only population found in the Mississippi drainage. All others abide in "arctic" or "near arctic" rivers collected by Hudson Bay, the Arctic Ocean and the North Pacific. What's more, the Montana fish have been seen to be genetically distinct.

So the Fish and Wildlife Service made them a "candidate" for the Endangered Species Act, a category that affords considerable protection in that it frightens private landowners and state bureaucrats into action. Still, in 2003 the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project sued the service for its refusal to list grayling. Thus chastened, the agency upgraded the threat under candidate status to "high magnitude and imminent."

Then in 2005 the litigants reached a settlement whereby the service agreed to make a final determination on listing by April 16, 2007. Eight days after the deadline the service proclaimed that it had been wrong all along, that the population segment wasn't distinct after all and that adfluvial and fluvial forms were basically the same.

In support of these bizarre conclusions it offered reams of tortured, contradictory mumbo-jumbo. For example, it stated that "there are clearly some heritable differences in juvenile swimming behavior among fluvial arctic grayling and the native adfluvial populations in terms of rheotactic response to flowing water." It cited a study by Montana State University fisheries professor Cal Kaya in which he placed young-of-the-year adfluvials and fluvials in a stream above fish traps. His hypothesis was that the fluvials would maintain themselves in the current and the adfluvials would drop down to the lake; and that's exactly what happened. The Fish and Wildlife Service even went so far as to acknowledge that adfluvials can't establish themselves in running water. After all that, the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that "fluvial arctic grayling in the Missouri River drainage do not differ markedly in genetic characteristics from adfluvial populations." Huh?

The determination goes on to assert that, in direct and brazen violation of federal law, it's permissible to allow fluvial grayling to die out in the Lower 48 because there are lots in Canada and Alaska. This is a favorite tactic of the Bush administration when it comes to ESA listings: Recall its outlandish and patently illegal determination that it's OK to wipe out wild Pacific salmon because there are lots in hatcheries.

What possibly could have possessed the professional biologists of the Fish and Wildlife Service to do an about face, deep-sixing a quarter century of peer-reviewed science and four expensive, painstaking status reviews? Her name was Julie MacDonald, a civil engineer who had been appointed as deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish, wildlife and parks, not because of her training in natural sciences or interest in fish and wildlife (both nonexistent) but strictly because of her political views. Sources within the Interior Department have informed me that MacDonald directly inserted herself into the last status review, that every Fish and Wildlife Service biologist involved with grayling strongly advocated listing, and that their determination was reversed when it got to the Washington, DC office.

Contrasted with other Bush appointees, the only thing aberrant about this science vandal was that she didn't excel at covering her tracks. For example, MacDonald attracted the attention of The New York Times, which reported that she had "peppered the biologists' draft [on the status of the greater sage grouse, which her agency declined to list] with barbed commentary and made wholesale changes," and the Washington Post, which revealed that she "altered scientific reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions." After MacDonald presided over the delisting of the Sacramento splittail, a threatened fish once common in California's Central Valley, the Contra Costa Times reported that she "earns as much as $1 million per year from her ownership of the 80-acre active farm in Dixon, California, that lies within splittail habitat."

A tip from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee initiated an investigation by the Office of Inspector General, which confirmed "that MacDonald has been heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program's scientific reports," that she "disclosed nonpublic information to private sector sources" which were inconvenienced by and adamantly opposed to the Endangered Species Act, that in her manipulation of bull trout data she had "forced a reduction in critical habitat miles in the Klamath River basin from 296 to 42 miles," and that the Portland, Oregon, assistant regional solicitor had described her sabotage of the greater sage grouse status review as "the most brazen case of political meddling" he had seen in his entire career.

On April 30, 2007 MacDonald resigned in disgrace, but the damage to fluvial grayling had been done. The determination will be contested in court by George Wuerthner, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Watersheds Project and Dr. Pat Munday, president of the Grayling Restoration Alliance. Munday, who finds the determination "appalling" and "riddled with contradictions and speculation" that twist "fisheries science and management policy into a pretzel," offers this: "While this. . . is a tragedy for grayling, it is also a tragedy for science, the Endangered Species Act, and the agency itself. When politics overrides science, it diminishes public faith in science and in the many good biologists who work at agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service. Furthermore, it engenders lawsuits that waste everyone's time and money--the Interior Department's Nero (Julie MacDonald) fiddles away while yet another rare species is consigned to the flames of oblivion."