The elusive Berry Cave salamander will get another shot at securing Endangered Species Act protection under a settlement agreement announced Thursday.
The agreement reached between the Fish and Wildlife Service and two conservation groups, the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Center for Biological Diversity, means the federal agency will revisit its 2019 determination that the salamander was neither threatened nor endangered.
“This agreement is an important step toward securing long-overdue protections for the Berry Cave salamander and correcting a harmful mistake from the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Liz Rasheed, a staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.
Rasheed added that the environmentalists “hope the agency will follow the science, as required by law, and give these one-of-a-kind salamanders the protections they need to have a shot at survival.”
