List Limbo

Being in the top 40 isn't always a good thing. Just outside the list of endangered and threatened species is a roster of potential candidates just shy of making the endangered and threatened lists, which grant federal protection. This week, the conservation group WildEarth Guardians will issue a critical report on the top 40 candidates, arguing that the government must act quickly if these puttering life forms are to have any chance of survival.

Environmental activists believe the Obama administration will be more receptive to their requests than the Bush White House, which moved in its waning days to allow Interior Department employees to ignore the evaluations of field scientists when deciding whether to add a species to the list. The previous administration said the rule was a way to cut through bureaucracy, but critics said it cut science out of the picture. Obama's interior secretary, Ken Salazar, killed the change on Tuesday.

There are currently 1,009 endangered plants and animals in the United States, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which maintains the lists. There are another 308 species on the threatened list, which means they are likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future. And on the less lucky list are 252 candidates for protective classification. Most of the mammals, birds, insects and plants on the current candidate list have sat there for years, without protection, as their numbers dwindle toward extinction.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is not supposed to give priority to cuteness (see bear, polar) or symbolic relevance (see eagle, bald). The way it was designed in 1973, the government's role would be to analyze population numbers and designations by several nature-monitoring organizations, some of them nongovernmental. Shrinking habitat has always been a chief factor in determining whether a species is under threat.

Almost 80 percent of the current top 40 candidates are located in and around the Pacific; just over half of them are plants. Nonnative species, which are often introduced by humans, have been the biggest factor in driving the most imperiled species into even deeper obscurity. The Warton cave spider, an arachnid known to exist in only one cave near Austin, Texas, was deemed a candidate in 1994. Another Southern critter that lacks instant name recognition, the Diamond Y springsnail, has sat in limbo for two decades, and hasn't been seen in the past few years.

"Insufficient information" is the common FWS refrain for having denied these creatures a full endangered or threatened listing. Conservationists counter that some species have such dismal numbers—only 39 Lanai tree snails were observed the last time the species was monitored in 2005—that scientists don't have much to work with to amass additional data.

The newest report by WildEarth Guardians will praise the government's recent endangered listings: the polar bear last summer and a Hawaiian plant species called Phyllostegia hispida last month. But it calls both a "drop in the bucket" of what actually needs to be done. "The nation needs an active endangered-species listing program, where groups of species are listed at once, and the annual listing rate increases by an order of magnitude," writes Nicole Rosmarino, who authored the report.

Over the past decade, the process has become infamous for moving at the pace of a sickly slug. From start to finish, the process of listing a new species typically takes about two and a half years. A caveat for an emergency listing was written into the ESA, but the Bush administration never opted to used it. (Bush listed only 60 species in his eight years, compared with 522 under Clinton and 231 under George H.W. Bush, who served half the time.)