The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently pinned a tentative price tag on what it could cost to save Santa Barbara County’s California tiger salamanders. The draft recovery plan, published on April 24, calls for more than $46 million to purchase and protect more than 30,000 acres of salamander habitat in the county.
The California tiger salamander has been protected in the county per the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for more than a decade, but Fish and Wildlife didn’t develop the recovery plan until the Center for Biological Diversity successfully sued the agency in 2012. The center claimed that the agency’s failure to develop a recovery plan for the tiger salamander was a “direct violation of its mandatory duty under the ESA.”
Andrea Adams, a biologist with the agency, emphasized that the plan is not a regulatory document. “All of these actions are entirely voluntary,” she said. “We don’t try to make anybody do anything.”
The draft recovery plan is, in other words, a roadmap. It describes an overall strategy for salamander preservation and restoration, sets out cost estimates, and makes recommendations for fieldwork and monitoring.
The draft estimates that, “if recovery actions are implemented properly and are effective,” the recovery criteria for the endangered salamander could be met by 2045. The estimated cost is pegged at a little more than $46.8 million: $27 million of that figure is for land acquisition and conservation easements; $6 million is for habitat restoration in migration and dispersal corridors; $5 million is intended for a population viability analysis; and $3 million is estimated for public outreach.
Most of the salamander’s habitat identified in the plan is currently under private ownership. That land will need to be acquired or converted into conservation easements, to achieve the draft plan’s goals. Those easements would be compatible with cattle ranching but couldn’t be used for row crops. Property owners with conservation easements enjoy the boon of paying lower property taxes.
There are other programs by which the Fish and Wildlife Service could entice landowners to protect salamander habitat. “Safe habor” agreements allow landowners to enter into a temporary contract to protect habitat on their land. Once the term is up, they can restore the land to its former use without facing a regulatory penalty. Landowners can also bank habitat through the Conservation Bank. That land can then be sold as mitigation credit to businesses whose land development plans could potentially affect other tiger salamander habitat.
Kevin Merrill with the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau is critical of the plan’s call for habitat preservation.
“It takes a lot of ag land out of production,” he said. “It is not, in my view, a well-thought-out solution.”
Andy Caldwell, with the Coalition of Agriculture, Labor, and Business, condemned the draft as “a complete waste of time, energy, and money” and a “dirty trick that enviros and regulators play on taxpayers and landowners.”
California tiger salamanders are still largely a mysterious species. The size of their population in Santa Barbara County, which has been isolated since the Pleistocene epoch, remains an open question. Salamanders are difficult to observe because they spend most of their time underground, where they shelter in burrows dug by gophers. They don’t hibernate in these holes, as was previously believed, but remain active, moving around and eating insects. If there’s little rain, salamanders might stay underground for years at a time.
“They sort of look like they’re always in a perpetual smile, the way that their mouth is shaped,” said Jenny Loda with the Center for Biological Diversity.
When they reach sexual maturity at the age of 4 or 5, they emerge from their dens and trek long distances from burrow to breeding pond. In light of this, the draft plan describes a strategy not just to protect the ponds but also the corridors that link ponds and burrows to one another. Fish and Wildlife has thus far identified 60 breeding ponds, split between six “metapopulations” of tiger salamanders.
“The field studies that have been done to date look at preserving 300-plus acres around each breeding site,” said Larry Hunt, a biologist who studies the endangered species. “In order to have these breeding sites connected, you’re looking at corridors between these breeding sites. Possibly hundreds of acres.”
The tiger salamander is one amphibian among many at risk of disappearing. In the 1980s scientists began to notice that amphibians were dying off at a catastrophic rate. Fungal infections, habitat destruction, and chemical pollutants have devastated the thin-skinned class of species. Today, one in three amphibian species is in decline.
Adams, the Fish and Wildlife biologist, pointed out that there’s a medical incentive to preserving amphibians: Research on frog enzymes recently led to the discovery of a treatment for genital warts. More importantly, however, she said threatened and endangered species are part of our “planetary heritage.”
“E.O. Wilson said that trying to cut down a rainforest for economic gain is like burning a renaissance painting to cook a meal. The salamanders are older than that painting; they’re hundreds of thousands of years old. The web of life here in the United States is our heritage,” she said.
The draft plan has a 60-day public comment and review period. A public workshop on the plan will be held May 22 at the Joseph Centeno Betteravia Government Administration Building on East Lakeside Parkway.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 7-14, 2015.