Are bees fish? A California court says so

An appellate court in California has ruled that bees can legally be classified as fish – so that they can be offered protection under the state’s Endangered Species Act (CESA).

Western US state California’s Endangered Species Act protects “native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant," but insects are not included.

Moreover, as Futurism’s The Byte reports, “a number of lobbies across the state’s agricultural industry argued with an initial ruling in 2020 that would allow bees to be protected under the state’s ESA.”

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation was defending the rights of bees, arguing that they needed to be afforded protections as “fish” since the CESA defines "fish" as anything that can be described as "a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals."

“We are celebrating today’s decision [May 31, 2022] that insects and other invertebrates are eligible for protection under CESA. The Court’s decision allows California to protect some of its most endangered pollinators, a step which will contribute to the resilience of the state’s native ecosystems and farms,” said Sarina Jepsen, Xerces Society’s Director of Endangered Species.

Background

“Four different bumblebee species are facing dire odds in the [United States’] most populous state. That danger mostly comes from the activities of huge agricultural interests,” writes Colin Kalmbacher in Law & Crime.

“In 2019, the California Fish and Game Commission moved to protect those bees, the Crotch, Franklin’s, Western, and Suckley’s cuckoo, by designating them as endangered, threatened, and candidate species under three sections of the CESA.”

Agricultural outfits such as almond growers, citrus planters, cotton ginners, and others sued. They said that bees could not be protected because the CESA does not include insects in its definitions.

The California Fish and Game Commission disagreed; “saying that the definition of fish can and should encapsulate bees and other similarly situated invertebrates because, in part, it already does in practice.”

As an example, the Commission listed at least one species of shrimp, snail and crayfish listed under the CESA. The Commission especially highlighted the case of the Trinity bristle snail.

The Trinity bristle snail doesn’t live in the water but was categorised as “threatened” in 1980 by being classified as a “fish.” The Commission thus argued that if a terrestrial snail can be considered “fish”, the category cannot be limited to animals that occupy the sea.

While in 2020 a district court agreed with the agricultural groups (“Petitioners argue that CESA does not authorise the Commission to designate insects such as bumble bees as endangered, threatened or candidate species”), on appeal, a Sacramento based appellate court overruled the lower court’s ruling.

The Xerces Society notes that bees qualify as invertebrates and thus should be offered protection under the CESA. They appealed and this time, were awarded the protection for bees in California state, as long as the bees were classified as “fish” under state protection laws.

Noor al Sibai writes in Futurism that in this latest ruling, the appellate court “declared that the judiciary is ‘tasked with liberally construing’ the state’s Endangered Species Act to make sure it’s effective.”

The “fish” designation for bees, while invertebrates, is somewhat awkward, since bees are better classified as insects. The “invertebrate” designation is semantically problematic, as Sibai points out, since she finds that “95 percent of all animal species fall within that category.’

Until further notice, however, bees, while obviously not really fish by any stretch of the imagination, are classified as “invertebrates” that fall into the “fish” category in California, at least.