"It's obvious that absent a subspecific designation, Mexican wolves will continue to flounder in the wild and may in fact go extinct for a second time," said Rob Edward of WildEarth Guardians, one of the groups that filed a petition.
The Mexican wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf, was exterminated in the wild in the Southwest by the 1930s. First listed as endangered as an individual species in 1976, the Fish and Wildlife Service created a species-wide designation for gray wolves in 1978 and included the Mexican wolves.
Edward said the Mexican wolves are being treated as a "side show" despite their fragile foothold in the wild.
Charna Lefton, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque, said Tuesday the agency will review the petitions. She added that the agency currently is preparing an environmental impact statement related to wolf recovery and that the writing of a new recovery plan would follow.
"The Mexican gray wolf is a huge issue for us and we are committed to having a healthy, stable population of wolves in the wild," she said.
The government in 1998 began reintroducing wolves along the Arizona-New Mexico line in a 4 million acre-plus territory interspersed with forests, private land and towns. Biologists had hoped to have at least 100 wolves in the wild and 18 breeding pairs by 2006.
The most recent survey shows there were 52 wolves scattered between New Mexico and Arizona at the end of 2008.
The reintroduction effort has been hampered by illegal shootings, complaints from ranchers who have lost cattle to the wolves and removal of wolves that have violated the program's three-strikes rule. Federal agents can kill or trap and remove any wolf that has been involved in three livestock kills within a year.
With the petitions, WildEarth Guardians, The Rewilding Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity hope to force the Fish and Wildlife Service to update the decades-old recovery plan.
"I think this is a real exception where you have this recovery program but you don't have a clear idea of what the recovery goals should be based on the current science," said Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Unlike the filing by WildEarth Guardians and The Rewilding Institute, the petition filed Tuesday by Greenwald's group asks the agency to list the Mexican wolf as either a subspecies or a distinct population.
The petition argues that Mexican wolves are more than 700 miles from their nearest cousins in the Rocky Mountains. They also occur in an environment unlike that of other gray wolves, where warm and arid conditions limit vegetation and prey.
Both petitions talk about the Mexican wolf's dire situation and the need to set aside critical habitat to ensure its recovery. Conservationists say the greatest threats to the wolves are livestock grazing and human activity.
If the Fish and Wildlife Service agrees with the petitions, the agency would have to develop a proposed listing rule and eventually a new recovery plan.
Lefton said revamping the plan "is not a new concept" to the Fish and Wildlife Service and that biologists and agency officials have been talking about the best way to go about it for some time.
--- Mexican gray wolf recovery program: http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/mexicanwolf/
