The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will continue to include the St. Croix herb Agave eggersiana on its list of candidates for a threatened or endangered species, but won’t take action on it any time soon.
“Our decision is to keep it as a candidate species for now. When resources become available, we’ll reconsider," said Lilibeth Serrano, the public affairs specialist at Fish and Wildlife, speaking from her San Juan office Wednesday.
Agave eggersiana is described as a robust, perennial herb native only to hillsides and plains in the eastern dry districts of the island of St. Croix. It has large funnel-shaped or tubular-shaped flowers and can grow from 16 to 23 feet tall, according to an article in Environment News Service.com.
The decision didn’t sit well with the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued Fish and Wildlife to get the agency to consider listing the plant. According to the terms of the settlement, Fish and Wildlife had to make a decision by Sept. 17.
“The Obama administration’s policies of delay and inaction threaten to write the final chapter on this island plant and other species that badly need protection but have yet to get it,” said the center’s staff attorney Jaclyn Lopez in a press release.
She did not return a phone call requesting further comment.
The plant is found only on St. Croix, and the Federal Register indicates St. Croix has 450 of the plants growing at various locations around the island. The Center for Biological Diversity notes that about 97 percent of them are on private land and threatened by development.
Serrano indicated that there are other species that are more threatened than Agave eggersiana, and they have priority.
“It’s funding and workload,” she said.
According to Lopez, federal Fish and Wildlife is hamstrung by an annual Congressional appropriations process that limits the available resources for listing actions. However, she said the budget for listing species has nearly quadrupled since 2002, with little increase in actual listings.
Furthermore, she said that since the court ordered federal Fish and Wildlife to consider Agave eggersiana, the agency knew it would be making this decision September 2010 and cannot claim that it did not budget for the listing activity.
Even if the plant is not listed on the Threatened or Endangered List, Serrano said there has been some success in increasing its numbers. She said the St. George Village Botanical Garden on St. Croix is propagating the plant, which will help ensure its future. Additionally, she said homeowners are using the plant as an ornamental, but in some cases, they don’t understand that to pluck off the “bulbils” when they’re dead ends the plant’s chance of reproducing, Serrano said.
The Center for Biological Diversity also sued Fish and Wildlife in to get them to consider listing Solanum conocarpum, a thornless, flowering shrub found in dry, deciduous forests on St. John, according to an article in Environment News Service.com. Serrano said that Fish and Wildlife will decide on Solanum conocarpum by Feb. 15, 2011.
Work on the two species began at the same time, but Serrano said they were separated along the way.
It’s taken 14 years to get to this point. The local Fish and Wildlife Division of the Planning and Natural Resources Department first filed for inclusion of the two species on the Endangered Species List in 1996. In 1998, two years after the petition was filed, the federal Fish and Wildlife decided that science supported protection for the plants and promised to make a decision within nine months.
With no decision forthcoming by 2004, the Center for Biological Diversity sued. In 2006, federal Fish and Wildlife decided that neither species should be listed as endangered. The Center for Biological Diversity again filed suit in 2008 challenging federal Fish and Wildlife’s finding.
