Are All Endangered Species Worth Saving?

Is it important to preserve Endangered Species? 

The answer is not quite as simple as some try to make it.

Over the history of the earth an estimated 1 – 4 billion “species” have gone extinct.  In today’s world it is estimated a few hundred species per year go extinct.

Would cuttlefish exist if something else had not gone extinct?  Will some future species not come into existence if we "save" the cuttlefish?  Hmmmm...I wonder how much money I could raise if I began a "Save the Cuttlefish" foundation?  Could I raise more if we renamed them cuddle fish? 

The knee jerk reaction (pop-environmental) to the question, “Is it important to preserve Endangered Species,” especially on the part of the pop-environmental movement, is generally a resounding, “Yes!” 

But some thought needs to be given to that answer.

Why “Yes,” as an automatic answer?  To assert we should go out of our way to “save” a species we should have some basis for the assertion.  What benefit does the species provide?  Is it a benefit we would miss if the species disappeared?  If one species is preserved, do we doom another from rising from insignificance to a place of prominence?  If someone had “saved” the dinosaurs, for example, would there have been mammoths and, eventually, elephants?

A bigger problem we run into with the glib answer is, “What is a species?”

The problem comes when formally listing a species as endangered, or threatened happens because a government agency or one of the environmental organizations feeding off those governments wants to expand its influence over a broad range of private and public actions, land uses and other aspects of day to day life.  The species is an afterthought.  

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, Chinook Salmon are a highly valued sport and food fish.  The fish are found in a great variety of habitats both coastal and inland.  They are plentiful in general but, due to the U.S. Endangered Species Act and pressure by a broad variety of pop-environmental groups, the salmon have been divided into “Evolutionary Significant Units.”

It is interesting that despite many river systems, each with Chinook, Oregon and Washington Chinook are simply Chinook but in areas where one group or another wants to expand control the Chinook suddenly becomes a discrete species even in portions of river systems.

Division into Evolutionary Significant Units allows for micro management of a generally plentiful species because the claim can somehow be made that, for example, a particular fish normally found in a very specific area is “Endangered” or, “Threatened.”  The listing is then used as a way to gain intimate control of all activity in areas amounting to millions of acres because, after all, we must save the fish, no matter how plentiful it might be.

The listing process can become rather silly.  The guppies in my fish tank, after a few generations, would be considered to be a “species” all on their own by some.

In the case of the Chinook Salmon (see below from the NOAA web-site) 17 discrete “species” are set aside.  Caught in the ocean there appears to be no real way to tell them apart.  Two “species” are endangered, seven are “threatened” and the rest are candidates or, of no concern.
 

Even DNA testing appears not to be a certain indicator demonstrating one “species” of Chinook is different from another and the issue is confused because, despite the stories about salmon always returning to their stream of origin, some “stray” or return to spawn in rivers other than the river they were hatched in.  That means “new” DNA is always being introduced into populations all the time.

Straying is an important survival mechanism.  For example, much of everything needed to support fish in the Columbia River in Eastern Washington, State was washed out to sea in the great Missoula Floods of ten – fifteen thousand years ago.  Everything was scoured down to bedrock.  If new populations of fish had not moved in since, there would be no runs in much of the Columbia River.

On the Washington Coast a similar disaster is recorded as having taken place on the Skagit River in the 1850s when Mt. Baker erupted and sent poisons cascading into the river.  Today, the Skagit is famous for its runs of some kinds of fish.

However much the various fish “species” may lack any special uniqueness, they are very handy for asserting control over large areas of land hence the constant hunt for “new” endangered species, especially those with potentially large habitats that can be snatched up and “preserved.”

Species come and go.  Extinction is a part of life and should be recognized as such.  If we, as a society, choose to “save” an endangered species we should do so for the sake of the species we target, not for reasons having more to do with expanding control over landscapes, expanding bureaucracies, creating the need for yet another “save the red whales of Mars” activist group or, for some other reason only remotely related to the species.