Are tribes allowed to mass-slaughter pygmy rabbits while their populations are rebuilding?

If they are turned loose…it seems likely only the strongest will make it back making it more worthy of reproduction… but I don’t know…

If I’m wrong on any of these points, I hope my biologist friends will correct me, on or offline.

I even missed the fact that the case was in court this week.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_re_us/salmon_listings

So I’ll guess we’ll know the legal answer to your question before long.

As for captive breeding programs, such as with the pygmy rabbit, it’s my understanding that these efforts are designed to return animals to the wild. The population won’t be considered recovered until they can sustain themselves and allow natural selection to restore “wildness” to the population.

Do you think there’s a distinction between how biologists and lawyers look at this issue?

http://www.pacificbio.org/ESIN/Mammals/PygmyRabbit/pygmyrabbit.html

I’ve always found it inconsistent that – under the ESA – we augmented our endangered pocket rabbit (I think that’s it) population with a captive breeding program, but can’t do that with salmon and hatcheries.

I know just enough to be dangerous — such as the idea of limiting efforts to boost natural stocks with hatchery production for only three generations, such as the genetic weakness caused by inbred hatchery fish, such as efforts to keep hatchery and wild stocks separate, such as the overall goal of restoring distinct wild salmon runs without interference from hatchery fish…

Anyone out there care to help us out with this question?

But, let me ask you this: If a “distinct population segment” is artificially augmented and those, let’s say “hatchery fish”, and native fish interbreed when mature, should those hatchery fish be counted as members of that population?

But Congress always intended that the law protect more than an entire species as defined by broad taxonomy. The original Endangered Species Act defined species as “any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants and any other group of fish or wildlife of the same species or smaller taxa in common spatial arrangement that interbreed when mature”.

Because of problems with the definition, the act was amended in 1978 to define species as “any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment (DPS) of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature.”

So the focus turned to what constitutes a “distinct population segment,” and this has become a complex and controversial issue for many species, including the Southern Resident (Puget Sound) killer whales.

I won’t go into it here, but I will recommend an excellent analysis by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that addresses salmon, as well as an article by lawyer Tatjana Rosen in The Encyclopedia of Earth. If anyone wants to pursue the issue for a given species, one must turn to the “status review and extinction risk assessment” to see why federal officials deem it important to save a given population. An update for the Cook Inlet beluga whales includes this comment:

“The population of belugas in Cook Inlet is discrete from other Alaskan and Russian beluga populations in the Arctic. Physically, these whales are isolated from other populations by the Alaska Peninsula. Despite extensive, dedicated marine mammal survey effort, the lack of sightings along the southern side of the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands chain suggests that the Cook Inlet population does not disperse into the Bering Sea…”

USFWS distinct population policy: http://www.fws.gov/endangered/POLICY/Pol005.html

Encyclopedia of Earth: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Distinct_Population_Segment_policy_(1996)_under_the_Endangered_Species_Act,_United_States

Beluga risk assessment (PDF 2.9 mb): http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Publications/ProcRpt/PR2008-08.pdf