Against all odds, the rare Devils Hole pupfish keeps on swimming

The Devils Hole pupfish's natural habitat is a single water-filled hole in a cave in the Nevada desert. Its numbers at one point dwindled to just 35 animals.

A wild population of just 175 fish doesn't sound like a lot. But this is the best the Devils Hole pupfish has been doing in about two decades."The question that I receive and my colleagues receive is, 'Why?' And you know, we're trying to answer that," says Kevin Wilson, an aquatic ecologist at the National Park Service.

The pupfish, which are only about an inch long, have no natural predators. Without fear, they'll curiously swim up to inspect divers or anything else that enters their isolated world.The fish tend to hang out near the top of the pool, swimming around in the shallow water that covers a rocky ledge. There, they feed on algae and spawn.

It was the first time Gumm felt like these fish really might go extinct on her watch. She recalls going to the hole just after the flood."Walking into it, we just weren't sure what was going to be there," she recalls."And the water looked like chocolate milk. You couldn't see any fish."It turns out that the flood may ultimately have helped the species, by bringing new nutrients into their environment.A magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Alaska.

The Devils Hole pupfish is famous in conservation circles. It was one of the first species to be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. After nearby development threatened to siphon water away from its lonely refuge, lawsuits aimed at saving it went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.Over the decades, several efforts have been made to set up a captive population of these fish in a separate tank, as a back-up insurance policy in case the wild fish met an untimely end.

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