Adopt an invertebrate this week

Those WildEarth Guardians can’t be still. They’re in the midst of celebrating their BioBlitz and biodiversity in general.

Think of this, eight weeks of suing somebody almost every business day to mark the International Year of Biodiverstity. Sounds like fun.

The efforts are to commemorate the 36-year anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. The group is saluting the act’s impact on preserving biodiversity. So there will be 36 lawsuits or legal petitions to protect something new under the act.

They are so zany and lawyer friendly I can’t believe it.

This week, is E.O. Wilson Week for the campaign. He commented, “Attention is turning (at last) to invertebrates and microorganisms, which are what I call ‘the little things that run the Earth’ and to their immense diversity."

Dr. Wilson sounds like he's no slouch in his field, so I’ll take his word that this is a good thing. He’s won two Pulitzers and is a professor emeritus and honorary curator in entomology at Harvard, according to the Guardians.

In honor of the doc’s "life-work, all species in this week’s BioBlitz line-up are invertebrates," the Guardians said in a news release. So what will we try to protect in honor of the week? The Sacramento Mountains checkerspot butterfly, the narrow-footed diving beetle, the unsilvered fitilarry (butterfly), the Brian head mountainsnail and the Arapahoe snowfly.

I really do get it. What is good about building a ski resort in the last remaining habitat of some creature that is nearing extinction? But the Guardians might want to consider a broader outreach. Preaching via “BioBlitz” theme weeks, next week is Prairie Week, can you say lesser prairie chicken?, seems like yelling on the highest mountaintop. Who’s going to hear you except the other crazed hikers?