A tiny fish that averages only 2.5 inches long derailed political careers, delayed construction of a massive dam and reservoir, caused a U.S. Supreme Court landmark case, and prompted legislation that remained controversial for decades. They now call it the ultimate David-and-Goliath story, the little snail darter against the mighty Tellico Dam, the New Deal giant Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), powerful Senate Leader Howard Baker, and three presidential administrations. And the snail darter almost beat them all.
Now, in the modern age of DNA technology, it turns out that the little fish was not only unheard-of at the time – it never really existed at all. A local university teacher, environmental activist, and opponent of dams, looking for ways to stop construction of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s, was exploring the Little Tennessee River with some students, when they happened upon a tiny fish that the teacher had never seen before. So, he gave it a name and started a push to get it listed under the brand-new Endangered Species Act. He and his allies reasoned that if he had never seen it before, it must be extremely rare, and therefore endangered. And that endangered species listing would block construction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed, the fish was listed, the dam halted, and a firestorm ignited from Capitol Hill to the White House. The TVA sued, attempting to either stop the listing or get its project exempted, but the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Endangered Species Act, one of the most powerful ever adopted by Congress, trumped four decades of planning for the Tellico Dam. An attempt to activate the cabinet-level committee that alone has authority to waive the Act also failed, and after nearly a decade-long delay, Congress finally intervened at the behest of the future Majority Leader, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, exempting the project from the Act. President Jimmy Carter reluctantly signed the bill into law and the dam was completed in 1979.
Now comes the not-so-surprising conclusion, as Yale Peabody Museum ichthyology curator Dr. Thomas Near explains, “There is, technically, no snail darter.” He also suspects that even researchers in the 1970s knew that but used it anyway as a means for fighting the dam. “I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near told the New York Times.
The secret could not last forever, though. A former TVA biologist named Jeffrey Simmons, coauthor of a new definitive study of the snail darter, discovered some of the fish in 2015 in Alabama and Mississippi, where they should not have been. Sure enough, DNA testing proved the fish is in fact a stargazing darter, a species common in at least nine states along the Mississippi and its tributaries. The snail darter was never a separate species, nor even a subspecies, and was never endangered. The feds abashedly removed it from the endangered list in 2022, even before this new proof, having found widespread populations by then.
Defenders of the anti-dam snail darter battle, mostly people who were involved in it at the time, are still huffing and puffing indignantly about the new definitive evidence. One says, “This is still a success story. Its listing under the Endangered Species Act worked, regardless of what you call this fish.” What exactly does he think “worked?” Listing the nonexistent species did not stop the dam, though costing millions in construction delays, and changed nothing. It did result in a Supreme Court ruling on the power of the Endangered Species Act – maybe that’s how some define success.
Indeed, when the “snail darter” was removed from the federal protected list by the Biden Administration, then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland crowed that “The recovery of the snail darter is a remarkable conservation milestone that tells a story about how controversy and polarization can evolve into cooperation and a big conservation success.” “Recovery” being a term of art in this case, since there is no such species?
Haaland found the case downright inspiring: “By protecting even the smallest creatures, we show who we are as a country; that we care about our environment and recognize the interconnectedness of our lands, wildlife and people.” On that we can all agree. We do want to protect even the smallest creatures. Even a little fish that lived only in our imagination.
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