Pearl River Map Turtle
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A nonprofit conversation organization has sued the federal government for failing to protect habitat for a turtle only found in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed its complaint July 15 against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the Pearl River Map Turtle, which only lives in the Pearl River of Mississippi and Louisiana. U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and USFWS Director Brian Nesvik also are named as defendants.
The CBD says the biggest threat to the turtles is habitat loss. The turtles are named for intricate patterns on their shells that resemble topographic maps.
“The construction of dams and channels has permanently altered the Pearl River and driven the decline of Pearl River Map Turtles, who depend on its free-flowing fresh water to survive,” said Lindsay Reeves, a senior attorney at the CBD. “Now the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to build yet another dam on the Pearl.
“We’re at a pivotal moment where we need to protect the turtles’ critical habitat or risk losing them forever.”
The CBD says the project proposed by the Corps would dredge out the banks of the Pearl River and build a dam to create an enormous lake for real estate development. The center says this would be especially harmful because Pearl River Map Turtles can’t survive in lakes and construction of the dam would flood their nesting sites. The turtles depend on flowing freshwater to find food and shelter and need sandy beaches along the riverbanks to build nests.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected the Pearl River Map Turtle as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in July 2024, triggering a 1-year period to protect the turtle’s critical habitat. The CBD says the service missed that deadline, and it also says the designation of critical habitat is an important step in preventing the Pearl River Map Turtle’s extinction.
According to a study conducted by the center, plants and animals with federally protected critical habitat are more than twice as likely to be moving toward recovery than species without it.
With the Trump administration’s recent attempt to exclude habitat destruction from the types of harm the Endangered Species Act prohibits, the center says designating critical habitat is of crucial importance because it ensures that harms and threats to habitat are still considered.
The center seeks a declaration that the defendants violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to timely designate the critical habitat for the Pearl River Map Turtle; an injunction compelling the defendants to publish the critical habitat designation for the Pearl River Map Turtle in the Federal Register by a certain date and continued review of the defendants’ compliance as well as attorney fees, court costs and other relief.
The center is being represented by Reeves and Daniel H. Waltz.
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia case number 1:26-cv-2472
