Monday, Dec. 10, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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I love the Mojave.
I fell hard for its wild, stark beauty 15 years ago while working to restore and protect the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise. During that 9-month stint, much of it spent camping out in the desert, I quickly came to cherish the region’s more iconic residents — the splendid tarantulas, kangaroo rats, rattlers and bighorn sheep.
But as someone who even as a kid was captivated by everything creeping, crawling and flying, I also treasured the less glamorous species too often considered expendable — the amazing array of sturdy desert plants and tiny insects that quite literally hold the whole place together for all the rest of us, if we let them.
No species offers any clearer snapshot of the intricate relationships required to sustain a desert ecosystem that evolved over tens of thousands of years than the tiny Mojave poppy bee, which has now been reduced to only seven small populations, all of them in Clark County.
That’s why the Center for Biological Diversity has submitted a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking Endangered Species Act protection for the struggling bee.
Once known across much of the Mojave Desert, the quarter-inch-long yellow and black bee has been pushed to the brink of extinction by a range of threats, including grazing, unchecked recreational activities, gypsum mining and habitat fragmentation caused by development .
Some people question how we can afford to worry about whether a single wild bee species goes extinct when some members of our own species want to build more houses and use the desert as a playground and resource extraction center. A wiser question is how can we possibly afford not to worry about it?
That point is highlighted by the fact that the poppy bee is specialized to pollinate only two rare desert poppies, including the state-protected Las Vegas bear poppy and the federally protected endangered dwarf bear-poppy, which is found only in Washington County, Utah.
The story of the decline of the Mojave poppy bee not only offers a vivid snapshot of the larger scientific reality of the desert’s interconnected web of life, it spotlights the ongoing failure of the Clark County-run regional Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan to slow the ongoing decline of many of the very Mojave species it was supposedly established to protect.
That point is driven home by the fact that the Mojave poppy bee’s pollination services are critical to the increasingly rare Las Vegas bear-poppy, which is one of 78 species the MSHCP is supposed to be protecting.
Yet when the conservation plan was formed in 2001, the Mojave poppy bee was only listed as an “Evaluation Species,” meaning that more information was needed to support protecting the bee but that its status would continue to be evaluated. But despite the bee’s ongoing decline, its status has not changed and it isn’t even included in the county’s most recent analysis of the region’s imperiled species.
The bee’s decline has played a direct role in the decline of the protected Las Vegas bear poppy. Without true protections, we are stuck in a cycle of decline that will continue until both species go extinct.
But instead of increasing protections for these declining species, the county’s MSHCP managers are now asking for congressional action to dramatically expand the amount of land open for development by more than 200,000 acres, while simultaneously seeking to restrict the species protected by the plan.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is going about business as usual, permitting a massive expansion of a gypsum mine east of Las Vegas this year that will destroy more than 200 acres of habitat key to the survival of the bear poppy.
The poppy’s decline in the face of this ongoing, permitted habitat destruction makes clear that the MSHCP is actually doing a much better job of protecting development and mining than imperiled plants and animals.
The only way to reverse the ongoing destruction of southern Nevada’s unique desert ecosystems is to strengthen the protections provided by the MSHCP, and for it to finally hold land management agencies like the BLM to their responsibility to protect the habitat of our most-imperiled plants and animals.
Doing so is not only in the region’s best long-term environmental interest, but its best long-term economic interests.
Weakening protections, as currently proposed, will only hasten the loss of the very species and biological diversity the MSHCP was established to protect.
Tara Cornelisse is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.
