“I’m thrilled the Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to reconsider protections for these extraordinary, rare little salamanders,” said Chelsea Stewart-Fusek, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Protecting Berry Cave salamanders under the Endangered Species Act also means funding to improve Tennessee’s drinking water quality. That’s a big win for both the salamander and for the people of Tennessee.”
The Berry Cave salamander has pink feathery gills, lives its entire life in caves, and is incredibly rare. Populations have been found in just a small number of isolated caves, and in several of these caves only one salamander has ever been observed.”
Huge salamander, subject of ESA lawsuit, calls Knox County caves home
KNOXVILLE — The Berry Cave salamander may be the largest cave-dwelling amphibian in North America, but only a handful of people have ever caught a glance of one in its native habitat.
Even John Nolt, a local expert on environmental ethics who has a special connection to the rare salamander, doesn’t know for sure whether he’s seen one of the elusive amphibians. The salamander is native to only a handful of caves in Knoxville and Roane and McMinn counties.
But that hasn’t stopped the retired University of Tennessee professor from lending his name to a decades-long effort to have the colorful critter declared an endangered species.
“In the 1990s, I went caving several times in Mead’s Quarry Cave and occasionally saw a salamander or two that seemed to fit the description of the Berry Cave salamander, so I think I've seen them, but not being an expert herpetologist, I can't be completely sure,” Nolt wrote in an email exchange about the creature.
(Nolt is a founding member and former president of the Foundation for Global Sustainability, which serves as the nonprofit umbrella for Hellbender Press).
“The cave itself is interesting,” he continued. “A permanent stream runs through it. Usually the water is shallow but marks on the walls suggest that it can become deep and dangerous in a heavy rain. Some way back in the cave is a remarkable white stalagmite formed by water dripping from the ceiling.”
The cave described by Nolt is one of only nine in the whole world (all of them near Knoxville) where the giant salamander is believed to live, and experts say the population has been dwindling for years. The gated cave, within a relatively remote section of Ijams Nature Center, is very difficult to find and any unauthorized visit could jeopardize the salamander population.
Hayworth Hollow in the forest of Ijams Nature Center once featured an active quarry. The limestone caves of the area are home to bats and a salamander species that is the the center of an Endangered Species Act lawsuit. Thomas Fraser/Hellbender Press
The latest round in the legal battle to protect the animal came in May when attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, of which Nolt is a member.
SELC’s lawyers are arguing the agency violated federal law in 2019 when it reversed an earlier decision and denied Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the creature.
The case will be heard before a federal judge in Washington, D.C., due to jurisdictional issues.
A brightly colored poster child for Charles Darwin’s theory that isolation triggers speciation, the salamander occupies such a tiny, specialized slice of the evolutionary tree of life that its only ecological niche is in the limestone caverns of East Tennessee.
Adult salamanders are generally of a light purple hue with dark spots on their backs. They breathe through bright pink gills because they have no lungs and the largest specimens measure more than 9 inches in length, making them the largest type of cave salamander to be found in North America.
Their scientific name is Gyrinophilus gulolineatus, and they are believed to have diverged from the comparatively widespread spring salamander, experts say.
Berry Cave salamanders like to eat aquatic insects, which means their food supply depends on organic debris flowing into their dark abodes from the world outside. This makes them particularly valuable to deforestation and other types of human development.
Berry Cave salamanders are known to inhabit caves only in Knox and two other East Tennessee counties. Matthew L. Niemiller
“The salamander’s population size within each cave is understood to be small,” according to the lawsuit. “In four of the nine caves, no more than one salamander has ever been observed. In seven of the nine caves, no more than six salamanders have ever been found during a single population survey.”
Alarmingly, population surveys performed in 2018 were able to confirm the animal’s presence in only four of the nine caves where they had originally been found, the complaint states.
“Within their caves, individual salamanders are thought to maintain small home ranges from which they rarely stray. No dispersal of Berry Cave salamanders between caves has been observed,” the SELC attorneys wrote in court documents.
“The salamander spends its entire life in the caves’ subterranean waters and has been found in water depths of up to four meters. The species is sensitive to water pollution and requires sufficient flow of high-quality clean water at all life stages for its survival.”
Nolt’s involvement in the campaign to save the species dates back to 2002 and was originally prompted by a fight over an unpopular Tennessee Department of Transportation project.
“Though I, for example, have over the years developed a good bit of interest in and affection for Gyrinophilus gulolineatus, my original motive for filing the petition was largely to prevent construction of a road, the James White Parkway extension, that would have degraded existing neighborhoods, encouraging suburban sprawl and burgeoning traffic,” Nolt said.
“The Endangered Species Act has often been used for such purposes, which are tangential to and yet consistent with species protection,” he said.
The following year, Nolt filed a petition with the US. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to have the species added to the ESA’s Candidate Species Act.
“To list the salamander, the USFWS would first have to conduct a study to determine whether listing was justified and then create and implement a habitat protection plan; that these processes cost both money and staff time; and that, given budgetary realities, they would likely be postponed indefinitely,” he explained.
“Some years later, the Center for Biological Diversity bundled my petition together with many others and successfully sued the USFWS, demanding action on all of them.”
While the salamander was finally added to the list in 2011, the agency reversed the decision in 2019 after staffers were forced to implement a quota system that set annual targets for denying species protections.
SELC lawyers believe the quota may have inappropriately influenced the agency’s decision.
Even in the absence of such quotas, being listed under the ESA doesn’t automatically mean that a threatened species actually has effective legal protection because Congress has never fully funded the program, Nolt explained.
“This example illustrates not only the disconnect between law and species protection and but also a disconnect between ethical thinking and species protection,” he said. “With respect to the law, while all endangered species are supposed to be protected, which ones actually receive protection depends on economic and political contingencies.”
If they win the lawsuit, the SELC and Center for Biological Diversity are asking a federal judge to rule that the USFWS “acted arbitrarily and capriciously and violated the ESA.” They also want the salamander’s case sent back “for further analysis and a new listing determination by a date that is consistent with the ESA and this Court’s decision.”