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<br />. ' <br /> <br />ENDANGERED SPECIES <br /> <br />365 <br /> <br /> <br />Figure 15.1 Snail darter. (Photograph courtesy of R. Behnke.) <br /> <br />which fish habitat was modified by pollution of surface or groundwaters, water <br />diversion, impoundment, stream channelization, dredging, mining, overgrazing, <br />timber cutting, and recreation. Emphasis on western fishes in the following case <br />histories reflects our interests and the geographical distribution of endangered <br />fishes in North America. Minckley and Deacon (1991) provided excellent infor- <br />mation on the precarious status of native western fishes. <br /> <br />15.4.2 The Snail Darter <br /> <br />No discourse on endangered fishes would be complete without considering the <br />celebrated case of the snail darter, an early test of the ESA which resulted in <br />significant changes in the Act in 1978. The snail darter (Figure 15.1) was <br />discovered in 1973 in a part of the lower Little Tennessee River known as Coy tee <br />Springs (Ono et al. 1983). Shortly thereafter, the ESA was signed into law by <br />President Nixon. Convinced that the snail darter was new to science and very <br />rare, Dr. David Etnier, one of the discoverers, submitted a status report on the <br />fish to the FWS. The report suggested that the 7- to 8-cm-Iong fish, which lives in <br />fast waters and feeds on snails in winter and caddisfly and black fly larvae in <br />summer, was endangered, and its existence was jeopardized by a Tennessee <br />Valley Authority (TV A) dam (Ono et al. 1983). The snail darter may have lived <br />throughout much of the Little Tennessee before the advent of TV A, but dams had <br />apparently restricted its habitat to the last 24 km of the river before it joined the <br />Tennessee River. By the time the snail darter was described, construction of <br />TV A's controversial Tellico Project, a multipurpose water resource development <br />project, had been approved by Congress (in 1966), begun (in 1967), delayed by a <br />court injunction (for lack of an environmental impact statement), and resumed <br />(0 no et al. 1983). Controversy stemmed from TV A's assertion that the benefits of <br />the project would outweigh any disadvantages. Environmentalists countered that <br /> <br />..... <br />