Fifty-Plus-Year-Old Fish Story Finally Debunked

More than 50 years ago, militant self-styled “environmentalists,” along with some local farmers and Native Americans who opposed the building of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee, sued to stop its construction because it would threaten a newly discovered species of endangered fish, the “snail darter.” But a recent study reveals that the “new” species wasn’t new at all, nor could it have been endangered, because the fish in question was simply a local version of a well-known and common species. The snail darter case now becomes another instance of an increasingly common phenomenon over the past six decades: ostensible “experts” appearing to put their personal political agendas ahead of objective scientific research and the available data – and winning popular support for doing so.

The story begins in 1973 when a University of Tennessee biology professor went snorkeling with a few students in the nearby Little Tennessee River. The group found a two-inch fish on the river bottom that the biologist reported never having seen before, which he promptly christened the “snail darter.”

At the time of the “discovery,” tensions over construction of the nearby Tellico Dam were high. Opponents of the dam soon filed suit to block completion of the project under the recently enacted Endangered Species Act so as to ensure the snail darter’s survival. (It should be noted here that the “discovery” of the fish was very likely no accident, since the professor acknowledged that the very purpose of his expedition had been to find the presence of some species which could be used to halt construction of the dam.)

In 1978, following years of litigation, the Supreme Court, in an impassioned opinion written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, upheld the suit against the dam, despite the fact that by that time the project, begun by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1967, was already 90 percent complete. It thereby disregarded the opinion of a Federal District Court (which had dismissed the suit) that scrapping the dam at that point would mean that that “a large portion of the $78 million already expended” on it “would be wasted.”

The lower court also noted that the Endangered Species Act had been passed long after the dam construction began, and that Congress had continued annual appropriations for Tellico with full awareness of the snail darter issue. Just one year before the Burger Court’s decision, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) budget that Congress enacted contained funds for completion of the Tellico project, including relocation of the snail darter. The Supreme Court ruling thus ignored the District Court’s prudent observation that, “Where there has been an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources by Congress to a project over a span of almost a decade, the Court should proceed with a great deal of circumspection.”

The Burger Court’s decision so outraged a large segment of the public that, in an unusual display of bipartisanship, Congress passed a bill to remove the dam from the Endangered Species Act’s coverage. President Jimmy Carter signed that bill, allowing the dam to be completed in 1979.

The Tellico Dam continues in operation today, providing flood control, electrical power, and recreation facilities for the surrounding area. It is also reported by the TVA to have helped reduce unemployment in adjacent Monroe County from 28 percent to the equivalent of the national rate, thanks to the growing recreation industry.

It must be acknowledged that legitimate arguments had previously been made that the dam’s costs outweighed its benefits. But what is at issue here is the extent to which courts should allow policies duly enacted by Federal, state, or local governmental authorities to be undone thanks to dubious claims made by politically motivated scientists buttressed by the judiciary. If Tellico was indeed an environmentally ruinous project, the decision to prevent or halt construction should have been left with elected officials – not with scientifically unqualified judges who lacked authority to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives.

As things turned out, those concerned about the fate of the snail darter need not have worried – in 2022, the Department of the Interior announced that the fish’s population had “recovered” so well that it was officially being removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered wildlife. But that is not the end of the snail darter saga.

On January 3 of this year, as reported in The New York Times, a team of researchers led by Yale fish biologist Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the university’s Peabody Museum, reported in the Journal of Current Biology that the so-called “snail darter,” Pertina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is simply an eastern population of Percina uranidea, also known as the stargazing darter, which was never considered endangered at all.

As Dr. Near puts it, the Tennessee researchers “squinted their eye a bit” when describing the fish claimed to be the snail darter. It was, Near maintains, “the first and probably the most famous example of… the ‘conservation species concept,’” describing a situation “where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication” that they desire.

What one is tempted to call the snail darter fraud is one of the early instances of a broader problem that has plagued the United States over more than a half-century: the increasing politicization of science, in which individuals with scientific credentials are trusted purely because they are believed to be engaged in the objective pursuit of truth, even when that pursuit is twisted by the scientists’ political wishes or desire for unearned celebrity.

Consider, for example, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich’s widely celebrated 1968 book The Population Bomb (co-authored with his wife),which forecast that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” on account of the rapid depletion of resources caused by excessive population growth. Among the solutions Ehrlich suggested in that book was population control, including “various forms of coercion” such as eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children.”

Of course, Ehrlich’s forecast was notoriously wrong, as foreseen by population scholar Julian Simon, author of the 1981 classic The Ultimate Resource – a title referring to human inventiveness and imagination, which continue to enhance the natural resources available to us (such as fracking and advancements which greatly increased agricultural productivity). Although Ehrlich lost a bet with Simon over his forecast of an exhaustion of resources in the 1980s, and much of the developed world now suffers from a crisis of declining fertility, Ehrlich has never acknowledged more than minor errors in the book that earned him a MacArthur “genius grant,” among other honors.

Much more recently, there is the unfortunate case of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who won acclaim for his work as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases but undermined that reputation by his endeavor to stifle any dissent from his claim early in 2020 that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese “wet market” rather than in a nearby lab (whose work had been partly funded by the U.S.).

While Fauci can hardly be blamed for his original misdiagnosis, he misused his status by dismissing challenges to that position by announcing, “I am the science.” He even cited in defense of his claims an article that he had secretly commissioned to support them. And he dismissed the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by thousands of accomplished scientists late in 2020, which warned of the harmful effects of excessively broad government-mandated lockdowns and “social distancing” – warnings that were subsequently proven correct.

Anthony Fauci is a distinguished scientist, who through most of his career was well-respected in his field. One must conclude from his misconduct in dealing with the COVID controversy that the prevailing atmosphere in left-leaning academic and political circles ultimately went to his head, making him intolerant of disagreements and attributing all challenges to his claims to base motives.

While the Times itself performed a public service by publishing the story of Professor Near’s discovery about the nonexistent snail darter, it really merited placement on the paper’s first page (rather than on page 17) in view of its significance. Scholars studying the politics of science as well as American jurisprudence should be urged to consider this example.

Above all, scientists themselves should strive to free their inquiries from their personal political beliefs or wishes for popular recognition, reminding themselves that participating diligently in the pursuit of truth should itself be regarded as their greatest reward, along with their most effectual mode of service to their country.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.