Westerners see poetic justice in saving snakehead

DENVER — For years, Alan Gardner has watched Easterners tie up land and scuttle development in the West by asking federal bureaucrats to put various rodents, predators and pests on the nation’s endangered-species list.

Now it’s time for a little payback.

Mr. Gardner is leading a band of 13 commissioners from Western counties who have filed to seek protection for a rare new species: the northern snakehead fish, also known as the ?Frankenfish.?

Yes, Mr. Gardner understands that the carnivorous, Asian-bred fish not only can swim but also crawl across land and wreck havoc on local wildlife. And no, he lives nowhere near the Potomac River, where the snakehead makes its home — and that’s the point.

“As I read about this fish in the Potomac, I thought, ‘You know, that sounds like an interesting proposition,’” says Mr. Gardner, a commissioner in southwestern Utah’s Washington County.

“I discussed it with some other commissioners, and we thought that this could really let people in the East know how the Endangered Species Act works and how it can affect the lives of everyday people,” he says.

Sure, saving the Frankenfish is preposterous. But not much more so than some previous attempts to list species found in the West, says Roger Mancebo, a Pershing County, Nev., commissioner.

Mr. Mancebo cites the recent effort to win protection for the sage grouse, a bird so common that it’s hunted in 15 states.

As rural Westerners can attest, having an animal listed as endangered can have a huge downside for the locals.

In their application on behalf of the snakehead, the commissioners identify its habitat as a stretch of freshwater and land covering 68 million acres and cutting across 11 Eastern states and Washington, D.C.

In the unlikely event that their petition is approved, the snakehead’s hangouts would come under strict restrictions on building, transportation and recreation in the name of protecting the famous fish.

“Anywhere you’ve got an endangered species, it very much limits what you can do,” Mr. Gardner says.

Ken Burton, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman, notes that one impediment is that the snakehead already has been declared an injurious species, preventing it from being listed as endangered.

“An injurious species is any species that the secretary determines is harmful to resources, other wildlife, forests or agriculture,” he said.

But, Westerners ask, what about the listed gray wolf and grizzly bear?

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