Newsflash
January 24, 2008 – Conservation Groups File Suit to Obtain Protection for Rare Three-Foot Long Spitting Earthworm
Once declared by Aristotle to be “the intestines of the earth,” earthworms have been recognized for centuries as essential to the health of our planet’s soil. But one of the most interesting earthworms of all — the giant Palouse earthworm, native to the Palouse prairie grassland — is literally being ousted from its home turf by modern agriculture and other human activities. Though the unique Palouse ecosystem once teemed with underground life, today its soils have been dug up, disturbed, eroded, and polluted by farming, development, and pesticides.
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROFILE
PROTECTION STATUS: Not listed
PETITIONED: 2007 (Palouse Prairie Foundation, Palouse Audubon Society, Friends of the Clearwater, and three individuals)
RANGE: The Palouse bioregion in southeastern Washington, west central Idaho, and northeastern Oregon
THREATS: Habitat loss due to agriculture and development, and the invasion of exotic species.
POPULATION TREND: The giant Palouse earthworm was described as “very abundant” in 1897, but today sightings are extremely rare. The first person in nearly two decades to report a sighting of the species was a University of Idaho graduate student conducting soil samples in 2005. Prior to this sighting, two specimens were collected in 1988 and one specimen was collected 10 years earlier. An indication of the species’ rarity was documented by Fauci and Bezdicek in 2002, when they surveyed earthworms at 46 sites in the Palouse bioregion without a single collection of the giant Palouse earthworm.
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SAVING THE GIANT PALOUSE EARTHWORM
Today, a baffling 99.99 percent of what was once the Palouse prairie can hardly be called “prairie” anymore — almost all the bioregion’s grassland habitat has been destroyed to make way for agriculture and urban sprawl. Numerous species dependent on this habitat have experienced dramatic population declines, and many plants are thought to have disappeared from the region altogether.
To ensure that the giant Palouse earthworm doesn’t fall to the same fate, the Center and our allies have been working to protect it under the Endangered Species Act. In 2006, a coalition of individuals and conservation groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the species as endangered, but the Service failed to respond until October 2007, after the petitioning groups — joined and led by the Center — filed a notice of intent to sue. The Service then declared that the petition presented too little information to justify listing, even though the agency had originally told one petitioner it contained more data on the earthworm than did any other source. Determined to save this species from extinction, the Center has been piloting legal efforts to overturn the Service’s faulty decision, and in January 2008 we and our allies sued the agency. With Endangered Species Act protection, this rare, fascinating invertebrate can still be saved from disappearing altogether.
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Contact: Noah Greenwald
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