(STE) CALIFORNIA’S BEEFISH

Illustration by Slate

On Tuesday (31/05/22) a California court ruled that, under some circumstances, a bee can be a fish. The decision was veritable chum to libertarians who like to poke fun at California’s environmentalism. 

And at first, I thought they might have a point there—it does seem like a bizarre decision to just throw the rules of taxonomy out the window. But then I fell down a rabbit hole trying to understand what’s happening there—and it’s a lot more complicated that you might think.

In 2018, the Center for Food Safety, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and the Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the California Fish and Game Commission to include four species of bumblebees in the list of endangered species protected by the California Endangered Species Act. 

At the heart of their argument was Section 45 of the California Endangered Species Act, which defines a fish as a “wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.” They successfully argued that the inclusion of the word invertebrate technically allows the act to cover all invertebrates, not just aquatic ones.

Seven agricultural groups, including the Almond Alliance of California, quickly filed suit to overturn this decision, and the California Superior Court in Sacramento ruled in their favor in 2020, removing protections for the bees. But on Tuesday, the California 3rd District Court of Appeals reversed that decision, allowing endangered bees to qualify as fish in order to protect them.

Bees are not the only species to be reidentified as fish on a technicality; in the 17th century, the Catholic Church allowed residents of what is now Quebec to eat beaver meat during Lent. The semiaquatic rodent was considered a fish because it lives part of its life in the sea, which has medieval precedent. 

Sure, that’s a religious matter rather than a legal one. But the United States Supreme Court has also asserted what could be a questionable taxonomy opinion. In 1893, Nix v. Hedden determined that a tomato was a vegetable despite John Nix, a grocer looking to avoid a vegetable tax, arguing that it was a fruit, thus sparking a pedantic debate that continues to this day. (For the record, a tomato is a fruit botanically, because it is a “ripened flower ovary” that contains seeds. But from a culinary standpoint, it’s a vegetable, or the edible part of a plant, because it has no business being added to a fruit salad. “Vegetable” is not a botany term.) slate.com - link - Emma Wallenbrick - link - more like this (bees) - link - more like this (California) - link