Before getting to the biology of small populations, though, I wouldn't be providing the proper perspective on endangered species protection in the United States unless I spent a little more time talking about how the ESA is implemented. Look back at the five factors permitting listing. You'll see that there's a lot of room for discretion in interpreting whether or not particular criteria have been fulfilled, especially ``inadequacy of existing laws and regulations'' and ``other natural or man-made factors affecting its continued existence.'' Moreover, once a species is on the list, decisions have to be made about how much money to devote to its recovery. It shouldn't come as a surprise that some species receive much more attention than others.
Czech et al. [2] surveyed 2500 people in the United States (receiving 643 responses) and asked them to rank the importance of various broad groups of taxa in importance on a scale of 1-100. They tabulated total state and federal expenditure on endangered or threatened taxa in 1993, and tabulated conservation organizations that were focused on particular taxa (e.g., the New England Wildflower Society or the Connecticut Audubon Society). Surprisingly, the importance that people place on taxa is only loosely related to expenditures on their protection (Figure 2). The explanation is relatively straigthforward: Some taxa are associated with politically motivated and influential human constituencies, e.g., birds, mammals, and fish. They argue that ``the consistency with which the eight types of species accrue benefits from the Endangered Species Act as predicted by the social-construction/political-power matrix is remarkable'' (p. 1111). They present a matrix that describes these two axes of explanation (Figure 3) and argue that ``a holistic perspective that accounts for public preference and political reality will be more productive in the policy arena and thus for species conservation'' (p. 1109).
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