The Obama administration is formally declining to list the American pika as an endangered species. The pika, pronounced as "Bye-Bye, Ms American Pie-ka" is neither a yellow Pokemon nor a font, but a hamster-sized rabbit relative. It lives throughout the Western United States at high elevations, and it's extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, dying after only a few hours of 78 degree temperature. Which makes it the pocket-sized poster child for climate change (the larger version being white, furry, and ursine).
Last May, the Fish & Wildlife Service agreed to consider listing the pika. In an eyebrow-raising move, the agency noted that its potential decline was caused solely by climate change, not by other human-caused events such as habitat destruction. The decision was due February 1, 2010.
The pika lives at or near mountaintops known as sky islands. Individual pikas' range is about 2 kilometers, so they can't simply abandon one mountain for an adjacent one. A January 2010 article in the journal BioScience describes the pika's plight, which generally is more sensitive to longer hotter summers than to particularly hot but isolated days:
"The problem with global warming is that if [pikas] lose [their] snowpack, which provides insulation in winter, they freeze to death, and if the ambient air temperature heats up too much in summer, then they fry. That's the challenge," Peacock says, who has studied pika population genetics. "They're already at the top of the mountain. If you heat it up substantially, there's no place for them to go."
Overall, the Endangered Species Act has saved a variety of animals and plants from extinction, usually by ordering that its habitat be preserved. A small habitat can be spared from destruction fairly easily. The logistics of stopping loss of species due to climate change is entirely different -- one can't simply order a snowpack to cease melting. However, the Endangered Species Act demands no less.
Officially, the Fish & Wildlife Service claims that "while some pika populations are decreasing, others are not," and thus Endangered Species Act protection is not warranted. The
Center for Biological Diversity has a different take, calling it a political decision that defies science and the law. The Obama adminstration has only listed 2 animals in his first year compared to Bush's 8 and Clinton's 73, and he's denied protection for the terminally adorable spotted seal.
The pika-studying graduate student profiled in BioScience seems to agree. The decision whether to list an animal
is mostly a political issue. "It's not necessarily as science-based as would be ideal," he says. The USFWS contacted him, but only to ask about pika site occupancy throughout the park, which was 85 percent. Moyer-Horner says the listing seems more about convincing politicians that pikas are a symbol of climate change, because the science seems clear. "There's enough evidence to say that pikas are going to be among the first mammals to be adversely affected by climate change," he said.
Democrats criticized the Bush administration, correctly, for the many instances in which politics trumped science. On certain issues, such as endangered species and his stubborn insistence that clean coal is real, Obama seems no better.