Sunday, March 5, 2000 | 9:05 a.m.
On remote Blue Diamond Hill southwest of Las Vegas, a rare cactus is making a valiant stand in the fast-developing Las Vegas Valley. The Blue Diamond cholla, the only cactus of its kind in the world, now numbers 6,000 plants on about 300 acres.
Most of the cactuses are safely set aside on Bureau of Land Management land and about 1,200 of the plants cling to property owned by the James Hardie Gypsum Mine. Real estate officials for James Hardie say the company wants to trade their cholla (pronounced choy-a) land to the Bureau of Land Management so all the plants remain protected.
But environmentalists worry the company may then sell the rest of its 3,200 acres to developers who will construct an upscale housing development right next to the cholla habitat.
"If you lose even a few of these plants you lose your ability to maintain the population," Gayle Marrs-Smith, a BLM botanist, said. "Six thousand in the world is not many at all. The loss of a few is significant with such a small population."
The Blue Diamond cholla is one of 44 plants or animals in Nevada on the federal endangered species list. Most are designated threatened or endangered; the cholla is still one of four endangered "candidates."
The plight of these plants, fish, birds -- and the celebrated desert tortoise -- is symbolic of the traditional clash between the state's wild frontier and explosive development.
The prognosis is bleak for some species. Efforts to save others seem promising.
But the future is never certain for any species that have dwindled so close to extinction that they are now protected by the Endangered Species Act, originally enacted in 1973.
"The trend where we have rapid development is a trend toward the decline of biodiversity," UNLV environmental studies professor James Deacon said. "That's what we have in Nevada. In effect, humans are replacing the natives."
Nationwide, the federal list includes 482 threatened and endangered animals and 719 threatened and endangered plants. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service budget for Nevada's endangered species is $966,000.
More than half are Nevada's endangered species are fish.
Take the Moapa dace, a native of the Muddy River in the Warm Springs area that has withered from 4,000 fish to 1,000 in recent years, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fisheries biologist Cynthia Martinez said.
Man-made ditches and dams changed the river habitat, Martinez said. But the real danger came when somebody -- no one knows who -- dumped in the predator fish Tilapia in the river about 1991. The Tilapia began devouring the dace by 1995.
"At first it was just competition for food with the dace -- they change the habitat, they eat the vegetation," Martinez said. "Then they move on to the invertebrates. Then they start feeding on the dace."
Like most of Nevada's endangered species, the Moapa dace has a "recovery plan," a multi-agency strategy to save the fish. Part of the plan is simple: Kill some of the Tilapia with chemicals and construct barriers in several areas where it's possible to separate predator and prey.
Martinez said the dace has a chance at survival but is likely the most endangered of Southern Nevada's fish.
"It's got the biggest threat -- the Tilapia," Martinez said. "We're really on the edge right here."
Nevada's most storied fish is probably the Devil's Hole pupfish. The pupfish, the only fish of its kind in the world, lives in the warm spring-fed waters of an unusual, deep cavern pool roughly 65 miles west of Las Vegas, in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
The 1-inch fish rose to national prominence in the 1970s when Amargosa Valley farmers and ranchers went to battle with environmentalists who said that pumping the pool threatened to kill it.
The clash escalated. Bumper stickers that read "Save the pupfish" and "Kill the pupfish" summed up the debate. In 1976 the Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the fish.
"It was monumental," Martinez said. "It really was a landmark case."
About 200 to 400 of the fish exist, depending on the season, but those numbers have been relatively stable for years, experts say. The worst threat now is divers who sneak into the federally protected area and damage the underwater shelf pupfish use for spawning.
Perhaps the most famous of all Nevada's endangered species is the embattled desert tortoise. A decade ago the tortoise was at the center of a firestorm between environmentalists and Clark County's powerful developers who were churning up and building over the critter's desert habitat.
When the tortoise received protected endangered status Aug. 4, 1989, construction, mining and ranching halted in the face of $25,000 fines for every harmed tortoise.
Nobody predicted what happened next. The warring parties, with the help of a host of other interested players, including concerned citizens and local and federal officials, ironed out a compromise.
In a key tenet of the plan, developers agreed to pay $550 per developed acre for tortoise preservation. The payments also give them the legal right to "take," or kill, tortoises as they tear up the landscape.
Now the county has about $29 million and spends between $1.3 million and $1.6 million a year on tortoise preservation. Much of that money pays for rescue and a 34-square-mile site near Jean where about 2,000 endangered tortoises have been released. Tortoises on 517,000 acres are also cared for in their natural environment, designated a "critical habitat" south of Boulder City.
"This is still the model for the nation for bringing together a wide variety of people -- to get them working together on a plan they can all live with and still protect the tortoise," said Randi Thompson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman for Nevada. "It's a diverse group of people that normally wouldn't have lunch together. This just doesn't happen very often."
Some tortoise advocates still fret that tortoise populations are not rebounding. Few have accurate numbers, but counts are being made.
"The jury is still out," said Betty Burge, a passionate tortoise activist, who is waiting eagerly to see reliable tortoise population estimates. "It may be another five or 10 years before we know."
Burge, leader of the independent Tortoise Group, which helps coordinate tortoise adoptions in Clark County, was at the table when the tortoise compromise was struck. She moved to Las Vegas in 1973 and promptly began calling for tortoise preservation.
"Unfortunately, things have to get bad before they do anything," Burge said. "I'm ready to be very skeptical about whether we're doing enough, and is it in time? But I'm willing to wait and see."
Now Clark County is working on a 900-page Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan similar to the tortoise plan, aimed at protecting 79 at-risk species before they need federal protection, said Cynthia Truelove, Clark County's Desert Conservation Plan coordinator. The plan could eventually protect 240 species, she said.
The plan would draw an additional $600,000 from the tortoise money each year to protect such species as the silver-haired bat, yellow-billed cuckoo, speckled rattlesnake and the Las Vegas bearpoppy. The bearpoppy, a flowering broad-leafed plant, is not federally listed but is growing rarer.
"It used to be very common in the Las Vegas Valley," the BLM's Marrs-Smith said. "Now it's almost completely gone due to development."
The story of the Blue Diamond cholla is still developing. "For sale" signs went up late last year on James Hardie property and developers are said to be interested in the bulk of the company's 3,200 acres.
Federal officials say company officials seem willing to sell or trade roughly 500 acres of cholla land to the BLM.
A land sale is several years away as James Hardie continues to mine the site for gypsum, used for drywall, said Michael Mixer, a real estate broker for Collier International, which is handling the sale. Mixer wouldn't say which Las Vegas developers are eyeing the site that offers sweeping vistas of both Red Rock Canyon and the Strip.
"We're talking million-dollar views," BLM spokesman Phil Guerrero said.
Officials with James Hardie declined to comment. For now, federal officials hope the company sticks to its word to protect the Blue Diamond cholla.
"The future looks good, but if the management situation changes up there, the future will be uncertain and we'll have to re-evaluate," said Janet Bair, assistant field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Southern Nevada.
John Jones, resource manager with the Nevada Division of Forestry, added, "Our position is that this is a rare plant that is peculiar to Nevada, to Southern Nevada in particular, and that in itself is an inherent value -- the fact that this is not found anywhere else."
Environmentalists say the future of protecting Nevada's rare and disappearing species will continue to focus on the impact of man and other invasive species.
In Jarbidge, near the Idaho border, the bull trout faces harm if locals rebuild a U.S. Forest Service road, environmentalists say. Scientists are studying the waters of Lake Mead to determine if the razorback sucker fish is a victim of toxins in the water. Bird watchers hope that the few bald eagles who call Northern Nevada home eventually multiply.
"In a lot of cases, we anticipate problems and attempt to think about how we can live with the species," UNLV's Deacon said. "In many cases, we didn't, or won't. There have been some successes, there are still a lot of crises, and we've seen some failures."
Teri Knight, a director at the Nature Conservancy, agreed the state is both winning and losing battles over endangered species.
"We have a small assortment of conservation people and a huge amount of heritage we need to bring to people's attention and find ways to protect it and not fight wars over it," Knight said.
The Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit group, works with local and federal agencies to preserve endangered species, often buying up land to protect them.
"A lot of this seems like doom and gloom," Knight said. "You worry about species blinking out on you. But luckily there are a lot of partners out there who are worried, too."
Benjamin Grove covers Washington, D.C., for the Sun. He can be reached at (202) 628-3100 or by e-mail at [email protected].
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