JONATHAN TURLEY: RIP, Snail Darter: The Species that Shut Down the Tellico Dam May Not Actually Exist.

In the annals of environmental law, no creature is more famous than the Snail Darter, the endangered species that shut down completion of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. It required congressional legislation to allow the dam to be finished after years in the courts where judges maintained that the species had to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. According to the New York Times., the species may turn out to be as mythical as a unicorn.

The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”

Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College,  represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.

That was then.

The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.

Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology.

In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.

As David Frum began the chapter titled “Dam Yankees” of his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), “An early flag of the American Revolution displayed a coiled rattlesnake (and the fierce motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’) to symbolize the country’s fierce determination to rule itself. Two hundred years later, the animal with the best claim to represent the American character was not the rattler but a small freshwater fish: the snail darter…The fish might not have been much to look at, but it had a sure sense of timing.”