{"id":19317,"date":"2025-01-03T15:00:21","date_gmt":"2025-01-03T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19317"},"modified":"2025-01-03T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T16:25:02","slug":"this-tiny-fishs-mistaken-identity-halted-a-dams-construction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19317","title":{"rendered":"This Tiny Fish\u2019s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam\u2019s Construction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.<\/p>\n

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For such a tiny fish, the snail darter has haunted Tennessee. It was the endangered species that swam its way to the Supreme Court in a vitriolic battle during the 1970s that temporarily blocked the construction of a dam.<\/p>\n

On Friday, a team of researchers argued that the fish was a phantom all along.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is, technically, no snail darter,\u201d said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.<\/p>\n

Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology<\/a> that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.<\/p>\n

Dr. Near contends that early researchers \u201csquinted their eyes a bit\u201d when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority\u2019s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the \u2018conservation species concept,\u2019 where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,\u201d Dr. Near said.<\/p>\n

The T.V.A. began building the Tellico Dam in 1967. Environmentalists, lawyers, farmers and the Cherokee, whose archaeological sites faced flooding, were eager to halt the project. In August 1973, they stumbled upon a solution.<\/p>\n

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Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.For such a tiny fish, the snail darter has haunted Tennessee. It was the endangered species that swam its way to the Supreme Court in a vitriolic battle during the 1970s that temporarily blocked the construction of a dam.On Friday, a team of researchers argued that the fish was a phantom all along.\u201cThere is, technically, no snail darter,\u201d said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.Dr. Near contends that early researchers \u201csquinted their eyes a bit\u201d when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority\u2019s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.\u201cI feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the \u2018conservation species concept,\u2019 where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,\u201d Dr. Near said.The T.V.A. began building the Tellico Dam in 1967. Environmentalists, lawyers, farmers and the Cherokee, whose archaeological sites faced flooding, were eager to halt the project. In August 1973, they stumbled upon a solution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19319,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19317"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19320,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19317\/revisions\/19320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}