Never did I believe a fish could have a worse time of it than one chased around a skillet in a Virginia City kitchen—but that was before coming upon the curious chronicle of the Devil’s Hole pupfish. These fellers–if ever there was a tribe of uncommonly unfortunate fish, might be the most put-upon creatures ever to sprout fins and a sorrowful look.
Nestled in a boiling stretch of Nevada’s sand-swept real estate known to the modern map as Death Valley, and to all good sense as a place no man nor beast ought to linger, there exists a limestone burrow—a cavern deep and dark and filled with water so still it resembles the conscience of a tax collector. In that watery oubliette resides the most misanthropic fish to curse the evolutionary ladder–the Devil’s Hole pupfish.
Until recently, the entire census of this fragile folk could fit into a single soup bowl with elbow room to spare. But in the spring of our Lord 2025, disaster struck them in the form of not one but two earthquakes, which rolled in like nature herself had stubbed her toe and hollered through the Earth’s crust in pain.
The tremors, occurring in December and then again in February, jostled the peaceable stillness of Devil’s Hole. It wasn’t just a mild shimmy—these were proper Earth-thumpings, shaking the underground pool until it sloshed like a washbasin on ironing day.
The aquatic upending scraped the vital algae off a shallow shelf where the fish do most of their courting and dining. Worse yet, the tremors swept away their eggs–as if Mother Nature had grown spiteful and flung their nursery to kingdom come.
Biologists from the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and some Nevadans who ought to know better than to fish in Hell’s basement descended on the scene with clipboards and concerned faces. In the spring survey, they counted a paltry 38 pupfish flitting about the cavern’s depths—down from a more respectable 191 the previous spring.
You’d think this might end the fish tale. But nope.
In a feat of bureaucratic bravery and interagency gumption, the good people of science reached into their bag of tricks and brought forth 19 captive pupfish—raised like little nobles in the controlled waters of the Ash Meadows Conservation Facility—and reintroduced them into their wild ancestral tub.
They even consulted data and dietary knowledge to feed the little scamps until the algae could grow back, which is neighborly, considering most folks wouldn’t cross the street to help a fish unless it came with chips.
“There’s hope,” said a feller named Brandon Senger, who supervises fish as if they were schoolchildren. “They’re spawning again, and the algae’s on the upswing.”
Translated from scientific argot–the fish are frisky, and the underwater salad bar is back in business.
Superintendent Mike Reynolds, who oversees Death Valley with the same cautious respect one gives to a rattlesnake in a hammock, hailed the operation as a triumph of teamwork, technology, and tenderness. He might’ve said more, but the heat likely evaporated the rest of his sentiment.
And so, these pint-sized piscine pilgrims, alone in their watery dungeon beneath the desert sun–cling to existence with a stubbornness that’d make a mule proud. And though battered, beset, and bewildered—they endure.
The next count will come in the Fall, and they’ll probably have something to say about it—though likely in bubbles.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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