The besieged Preble’s meadow jumping mouse has gained a helping hand from two scientific experts, who changed their minds and now say the critter is special after all.
If federal officials agree with the new assessment, it would continue programs that protect streamside habitats across the Front Range – at a cost of as much as $150 million to developers and ranchers.
Most agree the Preble’s mouse habitat is at risk and with it the critter itself.
There is, however, much debate over whether this meadow mouse differs from the other meadow mice that can leap a foot in the air.
The federal Endangered Species Act protects both species and subspecies of animals threatened with extinction.
Last year, Douglas Kelt, a wildlife biologist at the University of California, Davis, tentatively endorsed a proposal to end federal protection for the Preble’s mouse.
Wayne Spencer, a senior conservation biologist at the Conservation Biology Institute in San Diego, also tentatively backed the idea.
Both experts have now moved to the mouse’s corner.
Citing new research, they declared the Preble’s mouse a distinct animal.
They agreed that previous studies used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were flawed.
To abandon the mouse now “would be unethical at best and possibly criminal at worst,” Kelt wrote in comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The study that found the Preble’s identical to other jumping mice is “now essentially moot,” Spencer wrote to the agency.
Developers, ranchers and county officials say they are spending millions of dollars to survey land and develop conservation plans for a rodent that looks and acts like other meadow mice.
A designation as an endangered species could lead to more than $150 million in conservation costs to landowners over the next 20 years, according to a Fish and Wildlife Service estimate.
One Wyoming rancher, Neil McMurray, told the agency that he abandoned a plan to build two small reservoirs for stock water, fish and wildlife after learning it would cost $10,000 to survey his land for mice.
Environmental groups contend the Preble’s needs protection from dam projects, cattle grazing and subdivisions that jeopardize riverside habitat in Colorado and Wyoming.
The movement to remove the Preble’s from the protected list stems from studies led by Rob Roy Ramey at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Ramey concluded that the Preble’s was indistinguishable from two other kinds of meadow mice.
Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service solicited and received comments from Kelt, Spencer and a third expert on a petition to remove the mouse from federal protection.
Kelt and Spencer both responded that the best available information suggested the mouse was not a distinct animal.
This year, a new study of the same mouse by Tim King at the U.S. Geological Survey came to the opposite conclusion: that Preble’s differs genetically and physically from other meadow mice in Western states.
The Fish and Wildlife Service turned again to the same experts. Kelt and Spencer said King’s study changed their minds.
Kelt called King’s work “vastly more comprehensive” and Ramey’s data “grossly insufficient” in hindsight.
Ramey responded that the Preble’s conservation effort could cost more than $500 million in the next 20 years at the expense of clearly distinct animal species that are far more endangered.
“It’s a good debate to have,” he said of his critics. “I wish they were more sporting in their attitudes.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service has hired the Oregon-based Sustainable Ecosystems Institute to convene a scientific panel to evaluate the two studies in the next 60 days so the agency can make a decision on the mouse by August.
“We’re not geneticists,” agency spokeswoman Diane Katzenberger said. The panel should “better help us understand the differences between Dr. King’s and Dr. Ramey’s research.”
Staff writer David Olinger can be reached at 303-820-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com.
