According to the AP report, which was published Sunday, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center will be closed and the individual desert tortoises in its care will be killed.
The San Diego Zoo, which is the principal manager of the DTCC, denies that either of those outcomes is in the cards.
"Although we understand that, at any point, it's possible to lose federal funds, we manage the center and we don't have plans to do those things," Christine Simmons, a zoo spokesperson, said. "We remain committed to working with the desert tortoise."
Simmons explained that some tortoises - for example, those who are suffering from such severe medical problems that they cannot be rehabilitated or released back into the wild - may need to be euthanized.
"That's a small percentage of the overall population" served by DTCC, she said.
A Monday press release from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Southwest Region also denied that any healthy tortoise now at the DTCC would be euthanized.
"Sometimes euthanasia of unhealthy pet tortoises is necessary, but only as last resort, and only after we evaluate other options," the statement said. "All healthy tortoises at the DTCC will be relocated to sites that will support the recovery of the species."
The italics are in the original text of FWS' press release.
Gopherus agassizii are native to the deserts of western Arizona, eastern California, southern Nevada, and southwestern Utah. The reptile, which can grow to more than a foot in length, was added to the federal list of threatened and endangered species in 1990.
The desert tortoise is a member of a family of animals that has survived since the time of the dinosaurs. However, its desert habitat has been increasingly lost to development, especially in the Las Vegas valley. According to a website maintained by Conservation Centers for Species Survival, 90 percent of individuals in the species have been lost in the last three decades.
Only about 150,000 individuals of the species remain in the wild, according to the San Diego Zoo.
The DTCC is partially financed by funds provided by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages a large proportion of the public land within the desert tortoise's range.
BLM is allocating less money to the DTCC because it is receiving fewer dollars from habitat mitigation fees paid by developers under section 7 of the Endangered Species Act.
"The funds go up and down, depending on what’s happening with the economy," agency spokesperson Erica Haspiel-Szlosek said. She explained that housing development in the Las Vegas valley, a principal source of the money that flows into the habitat mitigation fund, has taken a hit during the recent recession.
BLM ordinarily spends about one million dollars per year to operate the DTCC, Haspiel-Szlosek said.
"It will be about 1.5 million this year because we are preparing to trans-locate all the tortoises that are healthy from the center," she said.
Tortoises are currently being relocated from the DTCC to an undisclosed location near Trout Canyon, Nev. and others will be moved in the future to a site near Coyote Springs, Nev., according to the FWS statement released Monday.
Haspiel-Szlosek explained that BLM wants to stop caring for "former pet tortoises" and would cease support for the DTCC when the available section 7 funds run out sometime in 2014.
"Although we’ve been in that position for awhile, we don’t feel that’s part of what we do," she said.
About one thousand individuals are brought to the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center each year, according to the CCSS website. About 98 percent of those had been kept as pets.
A Washington Post article based on Sunday's AP report is here.
NOTE: This story also appears at Examiner.com.
NOTE: This story was edited on Monday, Aug. 26 to reflect additional information obtained during an interview with a BLM spokesperson and a San Diego Zoo spokesperson and from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press statement.
CORRECTION: This post originally stated that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Southwest Region office issued a press release about the controversy over the DTCC on Monday. It was FWS' Pacific Southwest regional office that did so.
