Subspecies and protection (and eating crow)

[Kenelm Philip]

	Well, thanks to Neil Jones' posting on this topic, I found today
that I have been entertaining a misconception for over 15 years now. As
Jim Kruse stated, the 1984 revision of the Endangered Species Act had an
'or' where it should have had an 'of' in the definition of 'species'.

	After reading Jones' posting, I got my copy of the ESA out and
read it carefully--and noticed that the 'species' definition was very
awkwardly written, and that if the 'or' were replaced by an 'of' the
writing would be much better, and Jones would be correct. So I called
our friendly local F&WS enforcement office (It's handy having them right
here in the same town) and found they had a 1993 revision, which I
picked up--and sure enough, that definition now reads "...population seg-
ment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife...", which means that
you _do_ have to name an insect as a species or subspecies before it can
be listed under the ESA.

	By the way, 'wildlife' is defined as including all arthropods, so
the first part of the species definition ("..includes any subspecies of
fish or wildlife...") does indeed apply to insects.

	I'm not entirely happy with the idea that taxonomic work is now
being driven by politics--but I guess that's the modern world. There
is still no basic need to name insect populations if you are merely
_studying_ them in parts of the world where they are not threatened,
so I shall continue to examine the geographic variation of Alaskan leps
without feeling an overwhelming urge to name everything...  :-)

							Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu

P.S. "And what does crow taste like?" "Well, a bit like spotted owl?" :-)




 
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