What Good is a Wood Rat?

 

Key Largo Wood Rat. Image downloaded from the Internet with no attribution

I spent 6 months in 1992 on loan to the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges where I tried to figure out how to reverse the negative impressions of the public toward the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  Our presence was a giant pain in the public’s collective ass because we were protecting endangered species of plants and animals and the highly independent Florida Keys residents, many of them future Tea Party Republicans, wanted nothing to do with us or our message.

For my study I had a series of 20 questions that I asked pro-environment people, anti-environment people, and those I assumed were in the middle (restaurant owners etc.) about the Fish and Wildlife Service.  My basic premise was “What has the Fish and Wildlife Service done right in past, what have we done wrong in the past, and what can we do better in the future?”

One steaming hot June day I talked with Shirley, the President of the Lower Keys Realtor’s Association.  We sat on the deck of her opulent house overlooking the water on Summerland Key and I grilled her with my questions.  A huge issue at that time was the Lower Keys Rice Rat, an obscure species with highly restrictive habitat requirements that remained at the edge of extinction in a few wetlands in the Lower Keys. 

When my interview reached questions about protecting endangered species, Shirley went for what she thought was my throat. 

“When the first person is told they can’t build a house because of a god damned rat,” she bellowed, “there is going to be a holy war in the Lower Keys.”

Giving Shirley time for her blood pressure to drop down out of the stratosphere I said, “Shirley, what does it tell you about the quality of the human environment when a rat is an endangered species?”  Shirley was dumbfounded and stopped in her tracks.  She pondered my question for a minute and said, “I never thought of that.”

 A week later she showed up at the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuge and inquired about becoming a volunteer.

Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife biology and the first professor of wildlife biology at the incomparable University of Wisconsin once opined “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

In other words, who are we to decide if a plant or animal has “value’ beyond its mere existence?

I thought of that saying and of my long-ago conversation with Shirley the Lower Keys real estate agent this morning when I read this story about research on the Key Largo Wood Rat, an endangered species that exists precariously on one island in the upper Florida Keys.   Research on the rat not only helps us understand it place in a functioning ecosystem, but also may lead to breakthrough’s in understanding how to protect human health.

Long ago at a Lion’s Club meeting in Palco, Kansas, I was asked by a grizzled old man if I thought it was right for a lizard to halt development of a water project. 

“What’s a skink?” he asked me after waving his arthritic hand in the air for several minutes.

I said, “A skink is a species of lizard.”

He replied, “Do you think a lizard should be allowed to stop a water development project?”

Yes, I do, but I wasn’t going to tell him that so I probed him and discovered that a state endangered species of skink was getting in the way of yet another small watershed development project and this man thought it was the worst thing since the atomic bomb.  He completed his explanation by asking me if I thought it was a good idea.

Rather than answering him I asked him if he knew what an armadillo is, saying “it’s a little animal that spends most of its life dead along the sides of roads.”  He knew.  I then said, “Armadillos are the only species of mammal that cannot contract leprosy.  They carry the virus in their blood system but produce a chemical that keeps the virus from growing and causing the disease.  If fact sir, there is enough of that chemical in one armadillo to treat seven human victims of leprosy.  Now do you know what is in that skink?”

He didn’t know.  I then replied asking, “Do you want to take the chance?”

Answering soto voce he said, “No.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “That’s why we have the Endangered Species Act, to keep all of the parts no matter how seemingly inconsequential together.”  I then asked for the next question.

Questions kept flying until well after 10:00 p.m. and I answered each of them to the best of my ability.  Eventually the meeting began to break up and when perhaps only 30 people remained my original skink questioner walked up to me.  Figuring he was about to verbally abuse me as had happened so many times before, I was surprised when he stuck out his hand to shake mine and said “I want to thank you for opening my eyes.”

I gave him my stoic bureaucratic exterior look saying, “Thank you sir. I’m happy to hear that.”  Inside however I was giving him two thumbs up thinking to myself “He got the point!  He heard the message!” 

Maybe with luck tomorrow morning he would be in the local coffee shop chatting with his buddies and asking them if skinks can prevent leprosy and what would happen if we lost it. 

The same response fits the Key Largo Wood Rat and its bacteria laden nests, or a skink on the prairie of western Kansas or any number of other species that seem "useless" to human kind.  Whatever the avenue is that works to get the message across I am all in favor of using it.