Two environmental groups have filed suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the agency's alleged failure to act to protect a rare plant found in the area of Utah's San Rafael Swell. But the agency denies the charge.

Mustn't touch it, say the groups. Wasn't planning to, says the agency.

Actually, the plant has that warning in its name. It's the Mussentuchit (pronounced "mustn't touch it") gilia, named for a region on the west side of the San Rafael Swell. The Mussentuchit desert has one of those whimsical old cowboy monikers that crop up from place to place in the Utah backcountry.

A lawyer for the environmentalists charged the federal agency "sat on its hands," doing nothing to protect the rare Mussentuchit gilia. In response, a botanist for the agency told the Deseret Morning News an interagency botany team has surveyed the species for five or six years and that federal agencies are working on a conservation agreement to protect it.

Asked whether the service has sat on its hands, she replied, "We try not to."

The service says there are several thousand individual plants of the species.

According to a petition dating to two years ago by the Utah Native Plant Society, the plant is a phlox with two to five "striking pale blue tube-shaped flowers."

The suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, names as defendants heads of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior. Plaintiffs are the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, and the Center for Native Ecosystems, Denver.

The San Rafael Swell has seen dramatic increases in off-road vehicle use, says a SUWA press release. Thousands of ORVs and dirt bikes have left "a spiderweb of scars across the landscape," it adds.

The suit says the extremely rare species is receiving little or no conservation efforts, "despite current and ever-increasing threats from oil and gas development, mineral extraction, grazing and tramping by livestock," plus ORV use, noxious weeds, collection, climate change and federal land exchanges, says the suit.

Mineral extraction, mostly gypsum mining, also poses a threat, it adds.

The BLM has allowed leasing on land occupied by the species and has "continued to allow harmful grazing practices; has failed to rein in illegal and destructive ORV use; and failed to monitor the species' status," the suit says.

On May 19, 2003, a petition was submitted to the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the plant, says the lawsuit.

Once the agency receives a petition to list a species as threatened or endangered, it has 90 days to decide if there are substantial scientific or commercial information indicating the protection may be warranted, says the suit. It calls this determination a "90-day finding."