Fish Of The Week (3)

When is a bee a fish? When it comes to interpreting California’s 1970 Endangered Species Act, it would seem.

Four types of bumble bee in the state are on the endangered list but it took a decision of three judges at the Appeal Court in Sacramento to bring them within the ambit of the Act and to afford them the protection of the law. The problem arose from the law’s definition of a fish, initially defined as an invertebrate and then extended to “a wild fish, mollusc, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals”.

Bees in general, and bumble bees in particular, are land-based invertebrates and while the man on the San Francisco trolleybus might well consider a creature that lives out of the water not to be a fish, the judges took an extremely liberal interpretation of the term. They held that for the purposes of the Act the definition of a fish included invertebrates, aquatic or terrestrial, a ruling that was good enough to secure victory for the conservationist.

At least there are some judges with a bit of backbone.