Friday, May 19, 2023 | 10:58 a.m.
A conservation group plans to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect a rare toad’s sole habitat from oil and gas operations in Nye County.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which announced the planned litigation this week, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services to protect the Railroad Valley toad under the Endangered Species Act in April 2022.
Krista Kemppinen, senior scientist over the Southwest and Great Basin for the conservation group, said the agency had until last month to make a decision but did not.
“We were forced to launch a lawsuit against them to basically force them to make a decision,” Kemppinen said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment.
UNR researchers identified the new species of toad in 2020, along with another new species, the Hot Creek toad.
Of all toads endemic to the Great Basin Desert, the Railroad Valley toad is among the smallest.
Their bodies are brownish-grey, warty and creased, and their undersides are coarse and white with black mottling in a distinct pattern.
The toad’s only habitat is in the wetland parts of Lockes Ranch, over about 1.1 miles in the Bureau of Land Management’s Railroad Valley Wildlife Management Area.
The two newly identified species of toads “are restricted to rare spring-fed wetlands, a habitat within the Great Basin that is vulnerable to habitat loss and exploitation, warranting urgent conservation initiatives to protect and preserve” them, a UNR study says.
The area is surrounded by desert that make leaving difficult to impossible for the toads.
Oil and gas operations on the public land could easily deplete or pollute the water the toads need to fulfill their life cycles, Kemppinen said.
“It’s a food source for other species, but there are so many ways that the toads can provide services to its environment that we don't even fully understand until it's gone and we see a degradation of the ecosystem,” she said.
