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Manly found himself wandering the desert owing to a series of unfortunate decisions. Three months earlier, he and some five hundred other argonauts had assembled in Salt Lake City, planning to journey together to gold country, in northern California. They’d arrived in Salt Lake too late in the season to take the most direct route, over the Sierras, and so, to avoid getting snowed in, they’d jogged to the south, along a pack trail, toward Los Angeles. A few weeks into the trip, they’d encountered another contingent of forty-niners, led by a fast-talking New Yorker named Orson K. Smith. Smith carried a crude map, which, he claimed, showed a different, faster path west. Most of the members of Manly’s group decided to follow Smith, only to reverse course a few days later, when they found their way barred by a canyon so deep it couldn’t be crossed by wagon. (Smith himself turned around shortly thereafter.) But Manly and a few dozen others forged ahead, along the illusive shortcut.
The canyon, they soon discovered, was the least of their problems. A detour around it led into some of the most inhospitable terrain on the continent—a rock-strewn waste that probably no white man had ever straggled through before. (A century later, much of the area would be given over to nuclear testing.) Water was scarce and what could be found often was too salty to drink. There was little forage for the oxen, who grew sluggish and emaciated. When one was killed for food, its bones, Manly noted, were filled not with marrow but with a bloody liquid “resembling corruption.”
Manly was traveling with a friend who had a wife and three small children. He served as a sort of scout, hiking ahead of the wagons to reconnoiter. The reports he delivered back to camp were so disheartening that after a while his friend asked him please to shut up; his wife couldn’t take it anymore. As the party approached Death Valley—at that point an uncharted expanse of desert—the mood grew particularly grim. Sitting around the campfire a few nights after Manly had broken down in tears, one man described the region as the “Creator’s dumping place,” where he “left the worthless dregs after making a world.” Another said it must be “the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt,” only the pillar had been “broken up and spread around the country.”
Just at the edge of Death Valley, spirits briefly lifted. On a stony ledge, the party chanced upon a cavern that contained a pool of warm, clear water. A few of the men plunged in; one recorded in his diary that he had “enjoyed an extremely refreshing bath.” Manly peered into the water and noticed something strange. The pool was surrounded by rock and sand. It was miles from any other water body. Yet it was dancing with fish. Decades later he would remember these tiny “minnows,” each “not much more than an inch long.”
The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis. Devils Hole pupfish are, as Manly described them, about an inch long. They are sapphire blue, with intense black eyes and heads that are large for their body size. They’re most easily distinguished by an absence; they’re missing the pelvic fins that other pupfish possess.
How Devils Hole got its pupfish is, as one ecologist has put it, a “beautiful enigma.” The cavern is a geological oddity—a portal to a vast, maze-like aquifer that runs far beneath the ground and holds water left over from the Pleistocene. It seems unlikely that the fish’s ancestors could have traveled through the aquifer; the best guess of ichthyologists is that they were washed into Devils Hole at a time when the whole area was wetter. The pool, which is about sixty feet long and eight feet wide, constitutes Cyprinodon diabolis’s entire habitat. This, it’s believed, is the smallest range of any vertebrate.
I first learned about Devils Hole thanks to a crime that took place there. On a warm evening in the spring of 2016, three men, all apparently drunk, scaled the chain-link fence that surrounds the cavern. One shot out a security camera, doffed his clothes, went for a dip, and left his underwear floating in the pool. Another vomited. The following day, a single pupfish was found dead, and a necropsy was performed on it. This led to felony charges. The police eventually released surveillance footage, which I watched and watched again. There were jerky shots of the men driving up to the fence in an ATV. Then, from an underwater camera, there were fuzzy shots of two feet walking along a ledge of rock, kicking up bubbles.
Everything about the crime—the piscine necropsy, the county jail’s worth of security, the little fish marooned in the middle of the Mojave—intrigued me. I started reading around and happened upon Manly’s memoir, Death Valley in ’49. I learned that desert fish are a rich and diverse group. Every year, the Desert Fishes Council holds a meeting somewhere in northern Mexico or the western United States; typically, the program for the meeting runs to forty pages. Pupfish are so named because males, wrangling over territory, look a bit like puppies tussling. In the Death Valley area alone, there were at one time eleven species and subspecies of pupfish. One is now extinct, another is believed to be extinct, and the rest are all threatened. The Devils Hole pupfish may well be the rarest fish in the world. In an effort to preserve it, a kind of fishy Westworld has been constructed—an exact replica of the actual pool, down to the ledge where the skinny-dipper’s feet were caught on tape. Meanwhile, a plume of radioactive water is creeping its way toward the cavern from the Nevada Test Site. The more I read, the more I thought, I really ought to visit Devils Hole.
Pupfish counts are conducted four times a year at Devils Hole. The counts are made by a team of biologists from the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nevada Department of Wildlife—agencies that cooperate (and sometimes squabble) over the fish’s future. It took me a while to arrange a trip; by then it was time for the summer census and about 105° Fahrenheit.
I met up with the team in the town nearest the cavern—Pahrump, Nevada. Pahrump has one main road, which is lined with fireworks shops, big-box stores, and casinos. From there it’s a forty-five-minute drive to Devils Hole, through a mix of desert scrub and emptiness.
In Manly’s day, the cavern would have been hard to spot until you practically toppled into it. Today, it’s impossible to miss owing to the ten-foot-tall fence, which is topped with barbed wire. One of the biologists had a key that unlocked a gate. This led to a steep, slippery path. Despite the ferocious sun, the bottom of the cavern was in shadow. Even in midsummer, the pool receives only a few hours of direct sunlight each day.
Some of the biologists were lugging pieces of metal scaffolding, which they assembled into a catwalk. Others were toting scuba tanks. Overseeing the whole operation was a Park Service ecologist named Kevin Wilson. Wilson has spent most of his adult life working with Cyprinodon diabolis and is regarded as sort of the dean of Devils Hole. (Though Devils Hole is not in Death Valley—it’s across the Funeral Mountains, in the Amargosa Valley—for administrative purposes, it’s considered part of Death Valley National Park.) Just before I arrived, Wilson had been featured in an article in the High Country News about the aftermath of the break-in. Thanks in good measure to his efforts, the skinny-dipper had ended up in prison. (The vomiter was sentenced to probation.) The reporter had made Wilson out to be a hero—a dogged desert Columbo—but, in the process, she had described him as potbellied and stern. Wilson was still brooding over the description. At one point he turned to the side so I could get a profile view of his stomach.
“Is this a potbelly?” he asked. I suggested it might better be described as a “paunch.” Normally Wilson would have been among those preparing to dive, but he’d recently failed some kind of fitness test. This became the subject of more joking.
When all the gear had been transported and assembled, another Park Service biologist, Jeff Goldstein, delivered a safety lecture. Anyone who was injured would have to be helicoptered out, and it could take forty-five minutes or more for a chopper to arrive. “So be careful,” he said. Then he took a poll: How many pupfish would turn up?
“I’m thinking a hundred and forty-eight,” Wilson guessed. Ambre Chaudoin, also with the Park Service, offered one hundred and forty. Olin Feuerbacher and Jenny Gumm, from Fish and Wildlife, offered, respectively, one hundred and sixty and one hundred and seventy-seven. Brandon Senger, with the state of Nevada, went with one fifty-five. Chaudoin and Feuerbacher, I learned, were married. Feuerbacher told me that he had popped the question at Devils Hole. Wilson made a barfing gesture.
Much like a municipal swimming pool, the pool at Devils Hole has a shallow end and a deep end. The pool’s deep end is very deep indeed. According to the Park Service, it descends “over five hundred feet.” How much over is a matter of conjecture, since no one has ever touched bottom and lived to tell about it. In 1965, two young divers went exploring and never resurfaced. Their bodies are assumed still to be down there, somewhere. At the shallow end is a sloping ledge of limestone, known as “the shelf,” which sits about a foot below the surface of the water. It’s on the shelf that the fish tend to spawn and also where they find the most food.
Goldstein and Senger, wearing masks, oxygen tanks, shorts, and T-shirts, plunged in. Within a few seconds, they’d vanished into the dark. Meanwhile, Chaudoin, Feuerbacher, and Gumm got down on all fours on the catwalk to count the fish on the shelf. As they called out numbers, Wilson recorded them on a special form.
Once the shelf census was complete, everyone retreated into the shadows to wait for the divers to resurface. Some owlets hidden in a crevice screeched. The sun crept down the western face of the cavern. “Stay hydrated,” Wilson admonished. I noticed a bathtub-type ring around the pool and asked Chaudoin about it. She explained it was a function of the pull of the moon; the aquifer beneath us was so massive that it experiences tides.
Though the pupfish inhabit only the pool’s upper reaches—they’re rarely seen below seventy-five feet—the vastness of the aquifer has nonetheless shaped them. In the desert, the temperature varies dramatically between night and day, winter and summer. The water in the cavern, heated geothermally, maintains a constant year-round temperature of 93°F and a consistent, albeit very low, concentration of dissolved oxygen. The conditions of high temperature and low oxygen should be fatal. Devils Hole pupfish have evolved—somehow—to cope with these conditions and, just as important, only with them. It’s believed that the stressfulness of the environment is what caused the fish to lose their pelvic fins; producing the extra appendages just wasn’t worth the energy.
Eventually flashes from the divers’ headlamps appeared, streaking through the pool like search beams. Goldstein and Senger heaved themselves out of the water. Senger was carrying a dive slate covered with columns of numbers.
“That slate holds the key to the universe,” Wilson declared.
Everyone climbed back up the rocky path, through the opening in the fence, and out to the parking lot. Senger read off the numbers on the slate. Wilson put these together with the count from the shelf to produce the grand total: one hundred and ninety-five. This was sixty more pupfish than had been counted in the previous census, and higher than anyone had dared guess. High-fives were offered all around. Goldstein did what he called “a little happy dance.”
“If there’s a lot of fish, we all win,” he observed.
Later, I did a calculation. Altogether, the pupfish at Devils Hole weighed in at about a hundred grams. This is slightly less than the weight of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich.
When the argonauts set off for the gold fields, the expectation was that a man with steady aim would never starve. Manly had been handed his first rifle when he was fourteen; it was, his father solemnly told him, “suitable for either ball or shot.” He’d soon become adept at killing, and the pigeons, turkeys, and deer he bagged were welcome additions to the family’s diet. In his early twenties, Manly hunted his way to Wisconsin. In one three-day period, he killed four bears. He ate so much bear meat he spent the next day vomiting. “So long as I had my gun and ammunition I could kill game enough to live on,” he would later write. In 1849, he and his companions shot their way to Salt Lake City. An elk Manly brought down weighed more than five hundred pounds and made “the finest kind of food, fit for an epicure.”
No larder can be drawn upon indefinitely, and even as Manly was eating his way across the continent, he was helping to make that practice infeasible. In the 1850s, Thoreau lamented the extirpation from New England of moose, cougar, beavers, and wolverines: “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?” Woods that were once thick with wild turkeys were, by the 1860s, all but empty of them. Eastern elk, once plentiful from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, were gone by the 1870s. Passenger pigeons, which formed such immense flocks they blocked the sun, were eliminated around the same time; the last great nesting event—which was also the last great slaughter—took place in 1882.
“It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870,” William Hornaday, who served as the chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian and later as director of the Bronx Zoo, wrote. By 1889, Hornaday reckoned, the number of bison living “wild and unprotected” had fallen to fewer than six hundred and fifty. He predicted that in a few years, “hardly a bone will remain above ground to mark the existence of the most prolific mammalian species that ever existed, so far as we know.”
Already in Paleolithic times, people had driven plenty of species—woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, mastodons, glyptodons, and North American camels—into oblivion. Later, as the Polynesians settled the islands of the Pacific, they wiped out creatures like the moa and the moa-nalo. (The latter were goose-like ducks that lived in Hawaii.) When the Europeans reached the islands of the Indian Ocean, they did in, among many other animals, the dodo, the red rail, the Mascarene coot, the Rodrigues solitaire, and the Réunion ibis.
What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence. If earlier losses had unfolded gradually—so gradually that not even the participants would have been aware of what was going on—the advent of technologies like the railroad and the repeating rifle turned extinction into a readily observable phenomenon. In the United States, and indeed around the world, it became possible to watch creatures vanish in real time. “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” Aldo Leopold noted in an essay commemorating the passenger pigeon’s passing.
In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally categorized as endangered, countless others are headed in that direction. American ornithologists have developed a list of “common birds in steep decline”; it includes such familiar creatures as chimney swifts, field sparrows, and herring gulls. Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging. Whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves.
As the crow flies, the fake Devils Hole is about a mile from the real one. It’s housed in an unmarked hangar-like building, the entrance to which is framed by a pair of signs. One reads Caution: Personal Protective Equipment Required Beyond This Point, and the second: Warning! Dihydrogen Monoxide: Use Extreme Caution.
The first time I visited, I asked about the signs. I was told they’d been put up to deter politically engaged if chemically clueless protesters from trying to break in and trash the place. (Dihydrogen monoxide is a jokey name for water.) Before I was allowed to enter, I had to step into a pail of what looked like urine but turned out to be disinfectant.
Inside, the walls were lined with steel girders, plastic pipes, and electrical wires. A poured-concrete walkway ran around a sunken pool, also made of concrete. The place was about as scenic as a factory floor. In fact, it reminded me of a spent-fuel-rod tank I once saw on a tour of a nuclear power plant. Then again, the fake cavern was fashioned to “bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes,” not mine.
Replicating a pool whose bottom has never been touched is clearly impossible, and the deep end of the copy goes down only twenty-two feet. In all other respects, though, it’s modeled closely on the original. Since the pool at Devils Hole is almost always in shade, the duplicate has a louvered ceiling that’s opened and closed according to the season. Since the water temperature in the cavern is a constant 93°F, at the simulation there’s a backup heating system. There’s the same shallow shelf, in this case made out of Styrofoam coated with fiberglass, with the same contours. (Laser images of the actual shelf were used to fabricate the replica.)
Not just the pupfish but much of the Devils Hole food chain has been imported into the facsimile. On the Styrofoam shelf float clouds of the same kind of bright-green algae that grow on the limestone version. The water swims with the same species of tiny invertebrates—a spring snail from the genus Tryonia, some tiny crustaceans known as copepods, different tiny crustaceans known as ostracods, and a couple of species of beetles.
Conditions in the tank are monitored continuously. If, say, the pH or the water level starts to drop, staff members receive computerized alerts. When major shifts occur, the system sends out phone calls. More than once, Feuerbacher, who works at the facility, has had to drive out from his home in Pahrump in the middle of the night.
Planning for the simulacrum began in 2006. That spring, a bleak one for pupfish, the census hit a record low of thirty-eight. “People were more than a little bit worried about that,” Feuerbacher told me. While the $4.5 million facility was under construction, pupfish numbers recovered a bit. Then, in 2013, there was another crash. The spring census yielded just thirty-five pupfish, and the facility, still in the testing phase, was rushed into operation. “We got a call from our higher-ups, saying, ‘What’s it going to take for you to be ready in three months?’ ” Feuerbacher recalled.
In the cavern, pupfish live for about a year; in the tank, they can hang on for twice as long. When I visited, Devils Hole Jr. had been in operation for six years. It held about fifty adult fish. Depending on how you look at things, this is a lot of pupfish—fifteen more than the total population on earth in 2013—or not very many. In addition to Feuerbacher, three other people are employed at the facility full-time, which works out to roughly one fishkeeper for every thirteen fish. The number was certainly lower than the Fish and Wildlife Service had hoped for. Feuerbacher thought the explanation might be a beetle.
The beetle, from the genus Neoclypeodytes, had been brought over with the other invertebrates from Devils Hole, and it had made the transition to the concrete version all too cheerfully. It was reproducing far faster than in the wild, and somewhere along the way it had developed a taste for pupfish young. One day, Feuerbacher was watching footage from a special infrared camera that’s used to capture images of larval pupfish when he saw one of the beetles, which is about the size of a poppy seed, go on the attack.
“It was sort of like a dog catching a scent,” he recalled. “It started making tighter and tighter circles around this one larva and then it just dove in and tore it in half.” (To extend the dog simile, this would be like a spaniel going after a moose.) In an effort to keep the beetles’ numbers in check, the staff had started setting traps for them. Emptying the traps involved sifting their contents through a fine mesh and then picking out each tiny insect with tweezers or a pipette. For an hour or so, I watched two staff members bent over this task, which had to be repeated every day. I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s. As the United States and the Soviet Union vied for Strangelovian supremacy, aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in radioactive particles, some of which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years.
Not coincidentally, Cyprinodon diabolis’s troubles also date back to this period. In January 1952, President Harry S. Truman added Devils Hole to Death Valley National Park. In a proclamation, Truman said his goal was to protect the “peculiar race of desert fish” that lived in the “remarkable underground pool” and “nowhere else in the world.” That spring, the Department of Defense detonated eight nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, about fifty miles north of Devils Hole. The following spring, it detonated eleven more bombs. The mushroom clouds, which were visible from Las Vegas, became a tourist draw.
As the ’50s wore on—and more bombs went off—a developer named George Swink started buying up parcels of land around Devils Hole. His plan was to construct from scratch a new town to house test-site workers. Eventually, he bought up some five thousand acres and started to sink wells, including one just eight hundred feet from the cavern.
Swink’s scheme stalled, and in the mid-1960s he was bought out by another developer, Francis Cappaert. Cappaert’s dream was to make the desert bloom with alfalfa. As soon as he started pumping from the aquifer, the water level in Devils Hole started to drop. By the end of 1969, it had fallen by eight inches. By the following fall, it had dropped another ten. With each decline, more of the shallow shelf was exposed. By the end of 1970, the pupfish’s spawning area had shrunk to the size of a galley kitchen. At this point, a biologist from the University of Nevada came up with the idea of constructing a sham shelf for the fish to breed on. Made out of lumber and Styrofoam, it was installed in the deep end of the pool. Since the deep end receives even less light than the shallow end, the National Park Service rigged up a bank of one-hundred-fifty-watt bulbs to make up the difference. (The fake shelf was eventually destroyed by an earthquake fifteen hundred miles away, in Alaska; because the aquifer is so large, Devils Hole experiences what are known as seismic seiches—in effect, mini-tsunamis.)
Meanwhile, several dozen pupfish were removed from the cavern in an effort to establish backup populations. Some went to Saline Valley, west of Death Valley; others to Grapevine Springs, in Death Valley. A third group was sent to a site near Devils Hole known as Purgatory Spring, and a fourth to a professor at Fresno State, who planned to raise them in an aquarium. All of these early efforts to create a refuge population failed.
By 1972, with more than three-quarters of the shelf exposed, the federal government decided it had no alternative but to sue Cappaert Enterprises. When Truman had set aside Devils Hole, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued, he had also implicitly reserved enough water for the pupfish to survive. The case, Cappaert v. United States, would eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. As it worked its way through the system, it divided Nevadans. Some saw the fish as an emblem of the desert’s fragile beauty. Others saw it as a symbol of government overreach. Save the Pupfish stickers appeared on car bumpers. Then rival stickers appeared. Kill the Pupfish, they said.
Cappaert eventually lost Cappaert v. United States. (The fish carried the day nine-to-zero.) In the decades since, his land has been acquired by the Fish and Wildlife Service and converted into the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. At the refuge, there are some picnic tables, a few trails, and a visitor center that sells, among other items, a plush-toy pupfish that looks like an angry balloon. A pair of signs outside the center note that Cappaert’s holdings spanned the ancestral lands of two indigenous peoples: the Nuwuvi and the Newe. In the ladies’ room (and perhaps also in the men’s), there’s a plaque with a passage from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Though the book chronicles Abbey’s stint as a ranger in Arches National Park, in Utah, he wrote most of it sitting at a bar in a brothel just a few miles from Devils Hole. “Water, water, water,” he observed:
There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
Jenny Gumm, who manages the fake Devils Hole, has her office in the visitor center, in a part of the building that’s off-limits to visitors. One morning, I stopped by to chat with her. A behavioral ecologist by training, Gumm had just moved to Nevada from Texas and was brimming with enthusiasm for her new job.
“Devils Hole is such a special place,” she told me. “That experience of going down there, like we did the other day, I’ve asked people, ‘Does this ever get old?’ For me it hasn’t, and I don’t think it will anytime soon.”
Gumm pulled out her cell phone. On it was a picture of a pupfish egg. The evening before, one of the staff members at the facility had retrieved the egg from the tank. “There should be a heartbeat by today,” she said. “You should be able to see that.” The egg, which had been photographed through the eyepiece of a microscope, looked like a glass bead.
Many fish—silver carp, for instance—produce thousands of eggs at a go. This makes it possible to farm them. Devils Hole pupfish release just one pinhead-sized egg at a time. Often these get eaten by the pupfish themselves.
We drove over to Devils Hole Jr. in Gumm’s truck and found Feuerbacher in the pupfish nursery—a room filled with rows of glass tanks, assorted equipment, and the burble of running water. Feuerbacher located the egg, which was floating in its own little plastic dish, and put it under the microscope.
When the simulacrum was rushed into operation, in 2013, one of the first challenges was figuring out how to stock it. With just thirty-five Devils Hole pupfish left on the planet, the National Park Service refused to risk a single breeding pair. It was reluctant even to surrender any eggs. After months of argument and analysis, it finally allowed the Fish and Wildlife Service to gather eggs in the off-season, when the chances of their surviving in the cavern were, in any case, low. The first summer, a single egg was collected; it died. The following winter, forty-two eggs were gathered; twenty-nine of these were successfully reared to adulthood.
The egg under the microscope proved that, beetle problem notwithstanding, the pupfish in the tank were reproducing. It had been collected on a little mat, which had been set out on the fake shelf expressly for this purpose. The mat looked like a piece of tatty shag carpet. “This is a good sign,” Gumm said. “Hopefully, there are other eggs that were laid around the carpet that also didn’t get eaten.”
The egg had, indeed, developed a heartbeat. It had also developed bright-purple swirls—incipient pigment cells. As the tiny heart in the tiny egg pulsated away, I was reminded of the first sonogram images of my own children and of another line from Abbey: “All living things on earth are kindred.”
Gumm told me she tries to spend some part of every day by the edge of the tank, just looking at the fish. That afternoon I looked with her. Devils Hole pupfish are, in their own small way, quite flashy. I spotted a pair fooling around, or perhaps flirting, in the deep end. The fish—stripes of blue that seemed almost to glow—circled each other in sinuous unison. Then the pas de deux broke up, and one shot off in an iridescent streak.
“To watch a small school of pupfish arc through a tiny pool of desert water is to discover something vital about wonder,” Christopher Norment, an ecologist, wrote after a visit to the real Devils Hole. The same is true, I thought, when the water has been piped in and disinfected. But, I wondered, gazing down at the fish in the tank, wonder about what?
It’s often observed that nature—or at least the concept of it—is tangled up in culture. Until there was something that could be set against it—technology, art, consciousness—there was only “nature,” and so no real use for the category. It’s also probably true that by the time “nature” was invented, culture was already enmeshed in it. Twenty thousand years ago, wolves were domesticated. The result was a new species (or, by some accounts, subspecies) as well as two new categories: the “tame” and the “wild.” With the domestication of wheat, around ten thousand years ago, the plant world split. Some plants became “crops” and others “weeds.” In the brave new world of the Anthropocene, the divisions keep multiplying.
Consider the “synanthrope.” This is an animal that has not been domesticated and yet, for whatever reason, turns out to be peculiarly well suited to life on a farm or in the big city. Synanthropes (from the Greek syn, for “together,” and anthropos, “man”) include raccoons, American crows, Norway rats, Asian carp, house mice, and a couple of dozen species of cockroach. Coyotes profit from human disturbance but skirt areas dense with human activity; they have been dubbed “misanthropic synanthropes.” In botany, “apophytes” are native plants that thrive when people move in; “anthropophytes” are plants that thrive when people move them around. Anthropophytes can be still further subdivided into “archaeophytes,” which were spread before Europeans arrived in the New World, and “kenophytes,” which were spread afterward.
Of course, for every species that has prospered with humans, many more have declined, creating the need for another, bleaker list of terms. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the so-called Red List, a species counts as “vulnerable” when its odds of disappearing within a century are reckoned to be at least one in ten. A species qualifies as “endangered” when its numbers have declined by more than fifty percent over a decade or three generations, whichever is longer. A creature falls into the “critically endangered” category when it’s lost more than eighty percent of its population in that same time frame. In IUCN-speak, a plant or animal can be flat-out “extinct,” or it can be “extinct in the wild,” or it can be “possibly extinct.” A species is “possibly extinct” when, on “the balance of evidence,” it seems likely to have vanished but its disappearance has not yet been confirmed. Among the hundreds of animals that are currently listed as “possibly extinct” are: the gloomy tube-nosed bat, Miss Waldron’s red colobus, Emma’s giant rat, and the New Caledonian nightjar. Several species, including the po‘ouli, a chubby honeycreeper native to Maui, no longer walk (or hop) the earth but live on as cells preserved in liquid nitrogen. (A term has not yet been coined to describe this peculiar state of suspended animation.)
One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.
The Devils Hole pupfish is a classic Stockholm species. When the water level in the cavern dropped in the late ’60s, the sham shelf and the lightbulbs installed by the National Park Service kept the fish alive. After the courts put an end to pumping near the cavern, the water level crept back up, but the aquifer never fully recovered. Today, the water level in the cavern is still about a foot lower than it should be. The ecosystem in the pool has, as a consequence, shifted and the food web frayed. Since 2006, the Park Service has been delivering supplemental meals, including brine shrimp and fairy shrimp—Grubhub for fish.
As for the pupfish in the hundred-thousand-gallon refuge tank, they wouldn’t last a season without the ministrations of Gumm, Feuerbacher, and the other fish whisperers. The conditions in the tank are meant to mimic nature as closely as possible, except in the one way that leaves the actual Devils Hole so vulnerable. The simulacrum lies beyond the reach of human disruption because it’s totally human.
There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands. As for the forms of assistance they rely on, these, too, are legion. They include, in addition to supplemental feeding and captive breeding: double-clutching, headstarting, enclosures, exclosures, managed burns, chelation, guided migration, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, predator-avoidance training, and conditioned taste aversion. Every year, this list grows. “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new,” observed Thoreau.
The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is twenty-three thousand acres in area, or roughly the size of the Bronx. Within its borders live twenty-six species that can be found nowhere else in the world. According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents “the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the second greatest in all of North America.”
That harsh conditions should beget diversity is textbook Darwinism. In a desert, populations become physically and then reproductively isolated, much as they do on archipelagoes. The fish of the Mojave and the neighboring Great Basin Desert are, in this sense, like the finches of the Galápagos; each inhabits its own little island of water in a sea of sand.
Doubtless many of these “islands” were sucked dry before anyone bothered to record what was living in them. As Mary Austin observed in 1903, it is the “destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.” Among those creatures that lasted long enough for their extinction to be noted were: the Pahranagat spinedace (last collected in 1938), the Las Vegas dace (last seen in 1940), the Ash Meadows poolfish (last seen in 1948), the Raycraft Ranch poolfish (last seen in 1953), and the Tecopa pupfish (missing since 1970).
Another desert pupfish, the Owens pupfish, was thought to be extinct, only to be rediscovered in 1964. By 1969, it was just barely hanging on, in a pond the size of a rec room, when, for reasons no one could quite explain, the pond shrank to a puddle. Someone alerted Phil Pister, a biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, who rushed to the site—a spot known as Fish Slough. Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets.
“I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pister spent the next several decades working to save the Owens pupfish and also the Devils Hole pupfish. People would often ask him why he spent so much time on such insignificant animals.
“What good are pupfish?” they’d demand.
“What good are you?” Pister would respond.
In the Mojave, I went to see as many fish as I could—island-hopping, as it were. In a pond not far from Devils Hole lives the Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish (Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes). The pond is surrounded by a landscape so sere it brought to mind Manly’s misadventures; just walking the couple of hundred yards from the road, I thought: even today, a person could die in the Mojave and no one would notice. The Ash Meadows pupfish, which look like paler versions of the Devils Hole pupfish, were darting around—once again, either flirting or fighting; I couldn’t tell.
Thirty miles away, in the tiny town of Shoshone, California, lives another subspecies, the Shoshone pupfish (Cyprinodon nevadensis shoshone). Like the Owens pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish was believed to be extinct, then was rediscovered, in this case in a culvert bordering an RV park. Susan Sorrells owns the RV park, as well as the town’s only restaurant and its sole store. With the help of various state agencies, she has created a set of pools for the Shoshone pupfish, which have proved a great deal more adaptable than their Devils Hole cousins.
“They went from being extinct to prolific,” Sorrells told me. The hot-springs system that feeds the pupfish ponds also feeds the local swimming pool, which I cooled off in one afternoon along with a bearded man. The man, I was unnerved to see when he turned around, had two large swastikas tattooed on his back.
The town of Pahrump also used to have a fish of its own, the Pahrump poolfish (Empetrichthys latos), which still exists, though, sadly, not in Pahrump. The fish’s original habitat was a spring-fed pond into which someone, either by design or by chance, released goldfish. The goldfish flourished, while the poolfish crashed. In the ’60s, groundwater pumping made a bad situation worse. Just as the pond was about to dry up entirely, in 1971, a University of Nevada biologist named Jim Deacon staged a last-minute rescue. Like Pister, he carried the remaining fish out in a pail. He managed to save thirty-two of them—or at least so the story goes.
Since its rescue, the Pahrump poolfish has lived on in an aquatic diaspora, wandering—or, really, being trucked—from one pond of exile to another. Kevin Guadalupe, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, is the fish’s Moses. I met up with him at his office, in Las Vegas, which was decorated with a poster showing Nevada’s forty species of native fish. “Just about everything on there is endangered,” he said, gesturing toward the poster. When he handed me his business card, I noticed it had a pine-nut-sized picture of a poolfish on it.
In the flesh, Pahrump poolfish are about two inches long, with dark, yellow-streaked bodies and yellowish fins. Like Devils Hole pupfish, they evolved in a tough environment where, by default, they were the apex predators. Much of Guadalupe’s job involves trying to prevent the poolfish from encountering anything like a real predator. As people move more species into the desert, new emergencies keep arising.
“A lot of the time, we’re running around with our hair on fire,” Guadalupe told me. At Spring Mountain Ranch, a state park about fifty miles from Pahrump, we visited the shell of a lake that had been home to around ten thousand poolfish. (The ranch once belonged to Howard Hughes, though by the time he bought it he was too paranoid about germs to leave his hotel suite in Las Vegas.) People had dumped the contents of their aquariums into the lake, and, unable to cope with the resulting predation, the poolfish had practically been eliminated. In an effort to get rid of the other introduced species—the poolfish were, of course, themselves transplants—the lake had been completely drained. Its red-clay bottom now lay cracked and baking in the sun. As the environmental historian J. R. McNeill has observed, paraphrasing Marx: “Men make their own biosphere, but they do not make it just as they please.”
At Desert National Wildlife Refuge, about forty miles from Pahrump, we toured another pond under siege.
“There’s one over there,” Guadalupe said, pointing to what looked like a small lobster poking its head out from under some muck. It was a red swamp crayfish. Red swamp crayfish are native to the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to the Florida panhandle. They’ve been moved around a lot because people like to eat them. For their part, red swamp crayfish like to eat poolfish. To give the fish a chance, Guadalupe had rigged up fake reefs for them to spawn on. These were made of sleek plastic cylinders with tufts of artificial grass sticking out of the top. Guadalupe was hoping that the cylinders would be too slippery for any hungry crayfish to climb.
The last poolfish refuge we hit was in a park in Las Vegas. By the time we got there, it was around noon and a million degrees and no one in their right mind was outside.
That night, my last in Nevada, I stayed on the Strip, at the Paris, in a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. This being Vegas, the tower rose out of a swimming pool. The water was the blue of antifreeze. From somewhere near the pool, a sound system pumped out a beat that reached me, dull and throbbing, through the sealed windows of the seventh floor. I really wanted a drink. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back down to the lobby, past Le Concierge, Les Toilets, and La Réception, to find a faux French bar. I thought of the Devils Hole pupfish in their simulated cavern. I wondered: is this how they felt in their darker moments?