Washington – An acrobatic mouse is threatening Bush administration efforts to give Western developers an upper hand over endangered species.
The Preble’s meadow jumping mouse of Colorado and Wyoming is in fact a distinct creature, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study released Wednesday.
The new study casts doubt on an earlier one, touted by Interior Secretary Gale Norton a year ago when she proposed removing the mouse from the federal endangered species list.
Officials were to decide next month whether to deny the mouse protection but will now request a six-month extension, said Mitch King, acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regional office in Denver.
“We are faced now with two very strongly conflicting reports from reputable scientists,” King said. “Our next step is to try to figure out why they’re so different.” The agency will ask a panel of genetic and ecology experts to decide, King said.
The previous study, done by a Denver biologist later hired by Norton’s department, concluded there was no genetic difference between the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse and the much more common Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse.
The new study by a federal researcher in West Virginia has a larger sample size than the older one, King said, and included different analyses.
Listed by the government as a threatened species since 1998, the Preble’s mouse stands in the way of any project that could damage its habitat, a broad swath from Colorado Springs north through Denver and Fort Collins and reaching north to Laramie.
Nearly 31,000 acres, or 48 square miles, were designated as critical habitat to be conserved for the recovery of the Preble’s meadow mouse.
A year ago, developers welcomed the findings of biologist Rob Roy Ramey of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Interior Department’s conclusion, based on his study, that the Preble’s mouse no longer needed federal protections. Ramey was later contracted as a science adviser to the Interior Department in its attempt to reclassify several species whose endangered status is blocking developers.
The new study was conducted by Tim King, a USGS conservation geneticist, and peer-reviewed by academic experts outside government. One reviewer, Eric Hallerman, a professor of fisheries and wildlife science at Virginia Tech, said King’s study debunks Ramey’s work.
“It contradicts it fairly strongly,” Hallerman said.
Denver Post staff writer Katy Human contributed to this report.
