Saving Species No Longer About the Prettiest

"There has been a very heavy bias toward 'charismatic megafauna' -- relatively large, well-known birds and mammals," a pair of Harvard researchers wrote in the 1990s. "All other classes of fauna, and all flora, have gotten extremely short shrift."

How short? The classic tale involves the California condor, a vulture so homely that its head looks as if it's on inside-out. In the 1980s, scientists captured the remaining few dozen condors, deloused them and began breeding them in captivity.

That was a great thing for the condors but a catastrophe for an even uglier species: the California condor louse. "It passed out of existence when they washed off the condors," said Nathan Yaussy, an ecology graduate student at Kent State University who blogs at http://endangered-ugly.blogspot.com.

Today, the folks at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which cares for most protected species, say that charismatic animals may have had a leg up in the past -- but they no longer care about beauty. Instead, funding is supposed to be parceled out to those most at risk, and species at the center of legal fights.

"The program does not approach charismatic species as a top-tier" priority, said Bryan Arroyo, who heads the endangered species program. "We're not saying, you know, 'Here's wolves . . . or polar bears, or whatever, we're going to give more money to that.' "

But budget data show the beautiful and the edible are still coming out on top. The top 50 best-funded species include salmon, trout, sea turtles, eagles, bears -- and just one insect and no plants.

The Chinook salmon in the Snake River in the Northwest, whose needs include fish-friendly improvements at dams, was listed as receiving at least $69 million in help. Other fish in the ecosystem benefit, too, but that's still more money than the total spent on all insects, clams, snails, arachnids, corals, crustaceans and every species of threatened plant -- about 72 percent of the whole list.

Environmentalists say this isn't the way nature works.

"You can't disregard any of the pieces of the puzzle if you want to save all the pieces of the puzzle," said Trent Orr, an Oakland, Calif.-based lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice. "You can't kind of cherry-pick and say, 'Oh, yes, let's have a world where there's charismatic mammals . . . but let's ignore the minnows.' "

There are small signs that people are listening.

The American burying beetle, which uses carcasses as nurseries for its young, gets three times the funding that it did in 1998. The orangefoot pimpleback, an endangered freshwater mussel, is getting six times what it did.

The Attwater's prairie chicken, a Gulf Coast species with a neck sac that looks like a radioactive gobstopper, is being bred in captivity at Texas zoos to keep it from disappearing.