THE PUPFISH WARS OF
Death Valley

Why not kill the pupfish? People have asked for it. Some even risked their lives over it. They'd had enough of this one-inch swimming mongrel.

I first started thinking about that question at Salt Creek in 1998, after seeing fading 'Kill the Pupfish' bumper stickers on old desert trucks. At the time, the words didn't mean much to me.

I had set up camp at Death Valley's Furnace Creek under a creosote bush. I cooked green beans, mashed avocados, made cheese and bread sandwiches, fried spinach, sautéed gulf shrimp, and watched the sun set.

By then, I had the most rudimentary working knowledge of a travel stove, and I learned to carry several days' worth of food in tightly wrapped plastic. Nobody told me you couldn't carry your kitchen into the desert. I had cold ice and I had lots of water.

When you have everything you need, and you get a good night's sleep, everything that follows can be pure joy. Pure wonder, and that is what happened the next day, when I pulled off the main road through Death Valley into the Salt Creek trail parking lot.

The trail followed Salt Creek, a trickle of water barely an inch deep. It doesn't take long until you notice them. The tiny little fish that somehow flourish in this inch of water.

Little saltwater fish in the desert.

The males are adorned with vibrant blue and yellow backs. They swim around the creek, almost joyously. Courting females, feeding, playing. They move around with a dog-like curiosity. That is what earned them their name.

There are hundreds. Thousands of pupfish.

The temperature of Salt Creek couldn't be less than ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Probably more. But these tiny creatures have survived the centuries in inches of steaming water.

Stovepipe Wells

It's 2026, and it's been 28 years since I saw my first Salt Creek Pupfish, Cyprinodon salinus salinus, a distinct population of the Death Valley Pupfish. I've been back several times since then, although I always make a point to see those pupfish.

In those 28 years, I've managed to see other pupfish too, scattered across the deserts of the southwest and into Mexico. The little Salt Creek Pupfish even convinced me to track down their equivalent in the Bahamas, Cyprinodon variegatus, living in sunburned tidal pools along the edges of mangrove forests. But maybe more than seeing the pupfish, I've been able to see their last stands, seeing not them, but where they are supposed to be.

Now I'm holed up at the Stovepipe Wells Motel, and I realize there will be no pupfish for me.

The storms came hard this winter. The valley flooded, Salt Creek tore through its banks, and the boardwalk was ripped apart. Rangers shut down access to the creek.

Stovepipe Wells is a motel, a gas station, and an RV park. More remote than Furnace Creek, more exposed. They were working on the water pipes — the ones that feed the rooms and the restaurant — and at some point someone opened the system to the air.

The water down there is old. Aquifer water, sealed away from the surface for thousands of years, maybe longer. It belongs to the same buried system that eventually reaches the springs — those thin corridors, surprisingly fragile, where life finds a way to hold on.

But once the pipes were opened, the whole pipe network had been exposed. Air, bacteria, backflow. They shut the water down.

Without water, the tourists left.

Now it's just the bar.

And me, and the locals.

I opt for a quiet, dark table in the bar. There is no food being served, no water, and no bar drinks unless they can be served without using the tap. Every other table is empty. Sable, the bartender, knows her IPAs. "This one is like a pine tree dragged through a giant grapefruit. You'll like it."

She has worked here for three seasons. "Seasons?" I ask. "Oh, no, I can't be here in the summer. The heat is horrible. I go places."

I prod, considering how remote this place is. "So, in a place like this, board is free. I have no expenses. I can do whatever I want. I woke up this morning and there was a Kit Fox out my window. The nature, the wildlife, I mean you can't beat it."

The first customer rolls in. Scott is the maintenance guy from Furnace Creek. He's helping out with the pipe issue. He's muscular, clean-cropped, and just something a little sad in his eyes, and he can finish a Coors fast.

Sisters Kathy and Denise, from Redding, come in next. They've been staying across the street at the RV camp. I had met them the day before, sitting out on their lawn chairs in their Class C. They are reminiscing about the burgers that they were used to ordering.

Jesse pulls up to the bar next. He is sitting two stools down when the sisters ask him what he does out here. He orders his beer and says he runs a claim out past the Grapevine Mountains. He's been working it for years now, and then he starts listing things: bentonite, gypsum, a little talc, borates, some perlite, zeolites, and barite veins. He says it the way someone might list groceries, like these were ordinary things to pull out of the ground. Then he keeps going: manganese oxides, traces of malachite, diatomite.

Eli finds a seat at the bar. He works nights out near Amargosa Valley, but before his shift he drives. Long loops through the basin, out along the empty roads.

He orders one beer, sips it slowly.

He rolled into Stovepipe Wells the same way I did. On the dirt road through Crystal and the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

Flats of water still inundated the low valley. I crossed over limestone ridges at the edge of the Amargosa Valley, and as I descended toward Ash Meadows, I saw it—the place I had been thinking about for 28 years. The place where the pupfish wars began.

While it sits within the Ash Meadows refuge, Devils Hole is actually a separate unit of Death Valley National Park, and it's tiny—just 0.06 square miles.

It is a tangle of fortified metal, gates, and chains, something out of an American Ninja or Dolph Lundgren set.

It's called Devils Hole, though "hole" doesn't really cover it. It's a window in the desert floor, a break in the limestone. You stand at the edge and look down, and it keeps going—down into the earth.

Divers have tried to find the bottom. They've made it to a depth of 436 feet. The bottom has never been found. Sheer walls and blackness.

The water isn't still. Earthquakes on the other side of the world—Japan, Chile, Alaska—send pulses through the cavern. The surface rises and falls, a slow sloshing—a seiche. Every distant rupture is felt here.

Near the surface, just inside that opening, there's a ledge—a shallow limestone shelf lit by the sun for part of the day. Algae grows there. Not much. Just enough.

That shelf is the entire world of the Devils Hole Pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis.

Not most of their world.

All of it.

Some years, fewer than a hundred fish remained alive.

Cappaert v. United States

Out at Ash Meadows in the 1960s, ranchers started pulling groundwater for alfalfa — big pumps, running steady. It's the kind of extraction that looks like nothing if you're standing next to the well. The water comes up clear and cold. What's the harm.

But that water came from the same buried system that feeds Devils Hole.

And slowly, the level began to fall.

An inch.

Another inch.

Down in the cave, that shallow shelf started to dry. That was the spawning ground—the only one. The place where the fish laid their eggs, where the algae grew, where the whole fragile cycle held together.

Take away the water, and the shelf disappears.

Take away the shelf, and the fish disappear.

It was that simple.

By the late 1960s, scientists were sounding alarms. The fish weren't declining in some abstract way. You could measure it—in exposed rock, in falling water, in the shrinking distance between life and nothing.

The government stepped in. The National Park Service argued that Devils Hole was more than rock. Rather, it was a place where inches of water, a narrow band of sunlight, and the timing of the seasons determined whether the fish lived or died.

The ranchers saw something else entirely: land, wells, water that had always been there. Water they believed was theirs. And now they were being told that somewhere out in the desert, in a crack in the ground that went down without end, a fish they'd never seen was more important than their fields.

That's where Robert Rudd came in—sunburned, practical, rooted in a landscape where water, when you found it, meant everything. In places like Pahrump and the Amargosa Valley, a county commissioner carried real weight, tied to roads, wells, access—the thin threads that made settlement possible.

The pumps ran long hours, lifting ancient water into irrigation ditches. The desert went briefly green. That green meant cattle feed, income, a reason for families to stay in a place that would otherwise push them out. The margins were never wide. Equipment broke. Heat warped metal. Wells had to go deeper. Every season a negotiation with the land.

This is a landscape shaped by a particular kind of frontier libertarianism—one that resists intrusion, regulation, and distant authority. Legal brothels operate here. The Chicken Ranch and others sit within the same cultural geography as the water wars.

Ranchers, sex workers, developers, federal scientists, endangered fish—all overlapping in a single desert basin.

The presence of the pupfish—and the federal power required to protect it—felt like an imposition from an entirely different world.

The water level in Devils Hole began to drop. Just inches. But those inches were enough—enough to expose the shallow limestone shelf where the pupfish spawned, enough for biologists to say: this is the line. Cross it, and the species goes.

From Rudd's side of the valley, it looked like something else: a boundary drawn underground across land that people had worked for years. A line you couldn't see, but suddenly couldn't cross. Pumps that had always run now had limits. Water that had always come up now came with conditions.

The case moved toward the Supreme Court, but out here it never stopped being local. It was about whether someone standing on their own land could be told that the water beneath it belonged, in part, to a fish they had never seen.

Rudd didn't argue this in the language of environmental ethics. He argued it in the language people around him understood. Conservationists had their slogan—Save the Pupfish—and he answered with one that cut just as clean:

Kill the pupfish.

In a place where water is the limiting factor in everything, restricting access to groundwater is a structural change. Fields go fallow. Herds shrink. Loans tighten. And so the rhetoric sharpened.

In the 1970s, the conflict turned openly hostile. A newspaper editor in Pahrump publicly threatened to dump rotenone into Devils Hole — to kill the pupfish and make it, as he put it, a moot point. Rotenone works by shutting down a fish's ability to use oxygen, suffocating it at the gills.

The logic was simple: if the fish is the reason the water is restricted, remove the fish.

Bumper stickers reading "KILL THE PUPFISH" appeared across the region. Some locals joked—only half-jokingly—that there were now two endangered species in Nevada: the pupfish and the American rancher.

In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, formally recognizing extinction as a national concern and placing responsibility for preventing it at the federal level. The Devils Hole fight preceded that law, but unfolded in its shadow.

The conflict now widened past being just local. It was structural—one way of measuring water in inches on a spawning shelf, another in acres, yield, and whether a place remains inhabited at all.

For all the talk of killing the pupfish, there were also people who wanted to take them. There were attempts—documented and suspected—to remove pupfish from protected sites. Not for science. For possession.

The black market for rare fish is real. A species like the Devils Hole Pupfish — isolated, famous, legally protected — would be a singular prize. The same fish that inspired calls for eradication were, to someone else, worth stealing.

There were confrontations. Threats. Real anger—building slowly and then arriving all at once, directed at something so small it feels absurd.

A fish.

A one-inch fish.

The whole thing went to the Supreme Court. The case was called Cappaert v. United States.

The Court held that when the federal government reserved Devils Hole, it also reserved the water necessary to protect the habitat. The shelf, the algae, the water level, and the fish could not be separated.

The Court recognized that the pool in Devils Hole is the sole habitat of the endangered pupfish, and that its continued existence depends on maintaining the water level in that pool.

The margin was measured in inches.

That was enough.

They ruled that the United States could protect not just the land, but the water beneath it—the exact level needed to keep that shelf submerged, to keep the algae growing, to keep the fish alive.

Out here, that decision hardened into something else—a disbelief that it had come to this, that a window in the earth, a ledge no bigger than a room, and a handful of fish could dictate what people could and couldn't do with their own water.

You can stand in Devils Hole today and understand the science of that decision. You can look down at the shelf and see how little separates survival from extinction.

But if you stand instead in a field in the Amargosa Valley, watching water come up through a pipe into a ditch that keeps everything alive, you can also understand how someone like Robert Rudd arrived exactly where he did.

You start to understand where the bumper stickers came from.

Kill the pupfish.

Not as a joke.

As a man standing on one side of a line that had suddenly, and irrevocably, been redrawn.

The Aquifer

What made the conflict feel absurd was also what made it real. A one-inch fish, a limestone shelf, a few inches of water—it didn't seem like enough to justify everything that followed: court cases, threats, decades of argument.

The fight was about water.

In the Amargosa Valley, water is already overdrawn. Every well, every pump, every field runs on groundwater — and groundwater only works as long as it keeps coming up. For a long time it did. Long enough that people built their lives around it.

That water moves slowly through rock. It is being pulled faster than it returns.

Heat tightens it further. Longer droughts mean less reliable recharge. Uncertainty is increasingly the norm.

The question shifts to how much water there is, and who gets it.

In that context, the pupfish becomes a limit—a visible boundary placed on something people assumed had none. It marks a line underground that no one can see, but everyone is forced to feel.

As that line tightens, the pressure moves.

It lands on the fish.

So the question keeps coming back, in bars and courtrooms and desert conversations that never quite end:

Why not kill the pupfish?

Pister's Buckets and the Desert's Pupfish

The decision didn't end anything. It exposed the pattern.

Once you start looking, pupfish are everywhere — scattered across the desert like fragments of something older, each one holding on in its own small improbable pocket. Left behind as the lakes shrank and the rivers went dry. Each population a leftover sentence from a much longer story.

The Ash Meadows Amargosa Pupfish lives in warm spring outflows — water that rises clear and constant, then loses itself back into the desert. It is one of six subspecies of the Amargosa Pupfish. It's full name is Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes. Nearby is a ghost: the Ash Meadows Poolfish, Empetrichthys merriami, gone by the mid-20th century once the springs were altered and the water table dropped.

The Owens Pupfish, Cyprinodon radiosus, survives because it was carried.

In the Owens Valley, biologist Phil Pister once carried an entire species in two buckets. The Owens Pupfish were on the brink, their habitat collapsed, their numbers reduced to almost nothing. Pister gathered the remaining fish and walked them to safety.

Two buckets filled with sloshing water.

A desert landscape that offered no forgiveness.

He later described it as the loneliest walk of his life, because he understood what those buckets contained—an entire evolutionary lineage. For a brief, completely real moment, the continued existence of a species depended on whether a man could walk carefully enough not to spill water.

That moment has a name now: Pister's Buckets. What does it mean for one person to carry the fate of a species? And what obligation follows from that knowledge?

The Shoshone Pupfish, Cyprinodon nevadensis shoshone, lives in a spring small enough to take in at a glance. It's still there — but barely. Less a stable population than an ongoing negotiation with disappearance.

Cyprinodon nevadensis calidae is gone. The Tecopa springs were channelized sometime in the mid-20th century, altered enough that the fish couldn't hold on. By 1970 they were extinct — early enough in the era of official listings to be among the first vertebrates the United States formally acknowledged losing.

The water is still there.

The fish are not.

There is also the Quitobaquito Pupfish, or Rio Sonoyta Pupfish, Cyprinodon eremus, living at Quitobaquito Springs on the Arizona–Sonora border.

Cottonwoods, shade, water, dragonflies—a small oasis tucked into a landscape that should otherwise be empty.

The fish have their version too: groundwater drawn down by nearby agriculture, long droughts, and then — abruptly — the border wall.

I was there in 2021 with my son, standing in the shade of those cottonwoods, looking out across water that has been rising here for thousands of years. And just beyond it, the wall—steel rising out of the desert, less than two hundred feet from the pond, thirty feet high, built just yesterday.

It is hard to describe what that feels like if you haven't stood there. The spring is quiet. Insects move across the surface. Birds come and go. The fish hold in the shallows. And behind it, something much louder: the policies of the Trump administration, which pushed construction here under the excuse of "national security," waiving dozens of environmental laws—more than forty in total, including the very reviews that would have studied what this might do to the water.

No assessment. No pause. No requirement to measure impact.

To build the wall, contractors pumped groundwater out of an already overdrawn basin—millions of gallons a month for concrete in a place where every inch of water matters. At the same time, the region was in deep drought.

By 2020, the pond dropped to record lows, in places shrinking toward mud. For a fish that lives only here, there is no fallback—no second spring, no migration. If this water fails, the species goes with it.

The wall itself cuts across what little continuity remains between these springs and the Rio Sonoyta drainage. Whatever connection existed is now fragmented by steel and patrol roads. What stands out is not just the damage, but the absence of concern.

The priority was speed. Everything else was secondary.

In New Mexico, the White Sands Pupfish, Cyprinodon tularosa, persists in isolated waters, some of them inside restricted military land.

In Mexico, the pattern repeats. At Cuatro Ciénegas, the Cuatro Ciénegas Pupfish, Cyprinodon bifasciatus, lives among blue pools and gypsum dunes in a system shaped over millennia. Agriculture arrived. Water declined. What remains is still alive, but diminished.

Other species did not hold. The Potosí Pupfish, Cyprinodon alvarezi, the La Palma Pupfish, Cyprinodon longidorsalis, and the Charco Palma Pupfish, Cyprinodon veronicae, are now extinct in the wild—surviving only in captivity, if at all.

And then there is the Pahrump Poolfish, Empetrichthys latos, the last of its kind.

It once lived in the springs of the Pahrump Valley, until groundwater pumping dried those springs completely. The species went extinct in the wild in the 1950s, saved only because a few individuals had been moved into refuge pools. It is the last of its genus.

And even its second life has not been simple. At Corn Creek, populations have crashed when nonnative species were introduced—mosquitofish, aquarium fish, things people released without thinking.

It is almost hard to accept that after everything—after ancient water systems and Supreme Court cases and careful recovery efforts—the fate of a species can still be undone by something that small.

I think about Pahrump Poolfish all the time, because I often visit Corn Creek, north of North Las Vegas.

There's a dark building there, set back among the trees, and it's something like a giant aquarium. Tanks of water filled with algae, shaded by the building and its eaves.

I stand there and stare into the glass, my eyes pressed up against it, trying to find them.

The Pahrump Poolfish.

I never see them.

I have not seen them after visiting the refugium for 25 years.

Maybe they are there, moving somewhere in the shadows.

Or maybe that's part of it.

Once a species is reduced to a few managed tanks, it begins to disappear in a different way.

Not gone.

But removed.

Something you have to be told is still alive.

The Yamaha Rhino

It was April 2016, right between the takeover of the Malheur Refuge in Oregon and the election of Donald Trump. A moment when the popularity of frontier justice was accelerating. They started out driving in the long emptiness of the Amargosa Valley, skirting the edges of Ash Meadows. Three men on ATVs—Trenton Sargent, Edgar Reyes, Steven Schwinkendorf—cutting across desert. The headlights made narrow corridors in the dark — hard-edged, temporary, nothing beyond them but black space.

They had been drinking, enough that it would later show in the footage, in the way they moved and the decisions that followed. Malibu rum—sweet, artificial, out of place. At some point the chemical taste took over. The shotgun came out. It was time to shoot some shit up.

The desert took the noise and gave nothing back. They zigzagged through Ash Meadows, past water that had been isolated for thousands of years, past fragile systems reduced, in that moment, to background. They blasted holes in signs and hollered at the night.

By the time they reached Devils Hole, the shotgun smoking, the decision was already made. There was a fence, a gate, posted warnings. They drove into it anyway, ramming the enclosure with the ATV until the metal bent. When it didn't open, Sargent took out his Mossberg 500 and fired at the padlock. The shot rang out. The lock held.

So they climbed over.

Once inside, they moved through the enclosure as if it were abandoned—tearing into equipment, destroying a sensor center, smashing a surveillance camera that was still recording. They were American Ninja. Dolph Lundgren in their own minds.

The footage would later show them entering, one of them struggling at the fence, then the others following. Then, minutes later, the camera inside the hole itself picked up movement.

Devils Hole drops straight down into darkness, but near the surface there is a shallow limestone shelf, a narrow ledge that holds everything. That is where the pupfish spawn—late April, eggs laid directly on that rock.

Sargent, totally wasted, stepped down into the pool and onto the shelf, his weight moving across it. He crushed eggs and larvae underfoot, the next generation reduced by inches and pressure in the dark.

They drank and partied, and at some point someone vomited. The smell would still be there in the morning.

When scientists arrived, they found beer cans scattered around, clothing left behind, equipment broken, the water disturbed. The place smelled of vomit. A pair of underwear floated in the pool.

Weeks earlier, the population had been counted at roughly a hundred and fifteen individuals—all of them confined to that one shelf, that one opening in the rock.

The cameras had captured everything: the entry, the movement, the moment a foot entered the water, a body crossing the algae shelf—the only breeding ground in the world—during peak spawning season.

There was no statement attached to it, no explanation that matched the scale of what happened. Just a Malibu Rum night—boys gone wild. They knew what it was. Everyone out there does.

And in the pool, at the surface, there was a single bright blue pupfish.

Dead.

No one could say whether it had been crushed, stressed, or knocked from the shelf at the worst possible moment. It was dead. That was enough.

There aren't enough of them for any loss to be incidental. That's just the math of small populations.

What's different this time is that someone caught it on video — the trespass, the disturbance, whatever it was. It happened on record, which is rarer than it should be.

The Park Service assembled what was known as the Scorpion Task Force—federal investigators, local law enforcement, wildlife officials. They collected everything: beer cans for DNA, spent shotgun shells, live rounds, even the underwear left behind at the scene.

The key turned out to be the vehicle.

A customized Yamaha Rhino—distinctive, modified, impossible to miss. Investigators found it listed for sale on Craigslist the very next day. That single detail unraveled the entire case.

Within days, they had names. Within weeks, confessions.

Sargent admitted he had entered the water. He said he had been drinking, said he was showing off, said he wanted to see how deep it was.

He also admitted something else.

He knew what Devils Hole was. He knew about the pupfish.

The next morning, still hungover, he went back. He had left behind his wallet and his phone. He broke in again to retrieve them.

The beer cans were still there. His underwear still floating in the water.

The damage already done.

The case moved quickly after that.

Sargent pleaded guilty.

Twelve months and one day in federal prison, sentenced in October 2018. Nine months of that for harming an endangered species. Nearly $14,000 in restitution. A $1,000 fine.

And a lifetime ban from all federal public lands.

A lifetime ban.

For one night.

For one fish.

This is what it leads to.

Devils Hole is now a cage.

It is surrounded by high fencing topped with barbed wire. Cameras watch every angle. Motion sensors track movement. The public can no longer approach the water. Visitors stand more than 20 feet above it, looking down from a distance.

People ask why.

Why does this place look like a prison?

Because without it, the species disappears.

Biologists monitor the fish constantly. They clean the site. They supplement food when necessary. Nearby, a climate-controlled facility holds a backup population—an artificial refuge in case the wild population collapses entirely.

The entire system begins to resemble something else.

An aquarium.

Badwater Basin

I leave Stovepipe Wells at three a.m. The road south is empty. Just asphalt and stars.

I reach Badwater Basin just before four. One car in the lot. When I step out, the silence is immediate and total.

There is one other man here. He is standing a little apart from his car, looking out across the basin as if he has already been there a while. Mid-thirties, maybe. Evan.

He tells me his dog is asleep in the back. His old pup.

I look over. The rear window is cracked, and I can just make out the shape of a dog curled into itself, unmoving. It's his assistance dog. Trained. Steady. Didn't wake easily. Needs the rest.

We walk out onto the Badwater Basin playa together. Two voices under the moon. He'd been moving around the West for a while now, living out of his car, chasing wildlife. Raptors mostly. Pronghorn. Anything that moved with intention. Landscapes are new to him.

He tells me about Afghanistan when I ask. Not the early years. Later. Convoys. Heat. Hours of nothing that could turn in an instant. An explosion, not close enough to kill him, close enough to alter everything. Head trauma. The world afterward was just slightly out of alignment. Sound was different. Time was different. The dog came later.

He said he tried going back to a normal life and found it didn't hold. Too many walls. Too much contained space. Out here, he explains, things make more sense. Distance helps. Silence helps. His old pup helps most of all. Dogs don't ask anything of you that you couldn't answer.

We are walking out to the edge of what we call Lake Manly…endless miles of a mirror of water. Underfoot is the cold white of alkaline salt.

The basin opens up in every direction. White and silver, a wide shallow arc, stretching toward the dark walls of the Black Mountains and the Panamint Range. The salt crust breaks, edges catching moonlight, seams dark with moisture. A faint mineral sharpness in the air. Nothing moves. No insects. No wind. Just distance and light and the sense that you are standing in the lowest place in North America with nothing left below you.

The lake stretched farther than I expected, a quiet mirror laid over the desert.

He keeps talking as we walk. About birds. About how they move, how they decide. About waiting hours for a single moment when something aligns—the wind, the angle, the behavior—and then it's gone. He laughs a little at himself, says he didn't expect to care this much about things most people never notice.

When we reach the edge of the water, he stops.

Looks out at the lake. Looks at the moon sitting in it.

Then he says he forgot his tripod. But he probably doesn't need it.

He shifts his weight and glances back toward the parking lot — a long way off now, his car reduced to a small dark shape against the flats. He said he could shoot handheld. He'd done it before.

I tell him no.

I tell him to go back and get it.

He hesitates.

You could see the calculation—the distance, the time, the effort of turning around and retracing everything we had just walked. It would take him close to forty-five minutes to get back and return. The light will change. The moment will shift.

He says it probably isn't worth it.

I tell him it is.

I say it again, more gently.

You don't come out here for this and not do it right.

He looks out at the water once more, then back toward the car.

Nods. Says alright.

Then he turns and starts walking, his figure shrinks slowly across the flats, the sound of his steps fading into the same silence that had been there before either of us arrived.

And now I am alone, at the edge of the water, watching the lake hold the moon.

Lake Manly

Before there were pupfish in creeks, before there were springs cut off from one another, before there was a place called Death Valley at all, there was water here.

And not like the inches deep water of the temporary Lake I'm looking out at now.

At its height, during the late Pleistocene, Lake Manly stretched for more than ninety miles along the floor of the valley. In places it was deep enough to swallow entire alluvial fans. The old shorelines ran high on the Panamint Range and the Black Mountains. They left terraces — faint ones, but still there if you know what you're looking at.

It is difficult, standing in the modern desert, to reconstruct what that would have felt like. Nothing here prepares you for water at that scale.

The valley floor that now radiates heat would have held a long ribbon of blue-gray water. Wind moved across its surface. Storms came down from the north. Waves broke against shorelines that are now dry and silent.

The edges held water longest. Cattails, bulrushes, sedges — wide belts of them, dense and rooted in soils that never fully dried out. That kind of vegetation doesn't grow just anywhere. It grows where the ground stays saturated, where the water table is close enough to matter.

Willow and mesquite grew along the edges. The air would have been different. Cooler. Wetter. Full of movement. Ducks, grebes, coots. Shorebirds along the mudflats. Pelicans and cormorants moved across the lake in loose formations.

Along the edges, herds came down to drink. Ancient camels. Horses. Ground sloths moving slowly along the margins. Dire wolves and American lions follow them at a distance.

In the shallows, life was constant. Invertebrates drifting in the water column. Insect larvae clinging to submerged plants. Small crustaceans pulsing in the light.

Fish moved through it all. Moving along shorelines, through wetlands, across connected water that extended far beyond a single spring or creek.

The ancestors of the pupfish lived in this world. They were not desert survivors yet. They were lake fish.

But then the water began to fall. Steadily enough that shorelines retreated year by year, generation by generation. The climate was warming. Wetlands were contracting. Channels were contracting.

The long lake broke into pieces.

Water pulled back into basins. Then into ponds. Then into springs.

The fish followed it down.

By the time the lake was gone, what remained were fragments. Springs fed by groundwater. Isolated. Chemically distinct. Thermally unstable.

Each one its own world. And in those worlds, the fish began to change.

The Backup Pups

They built a second Devils Hole.

Not out in the Amargosa Desert, where the cavern drops into black water and earthquakes send waves up the walls, but inside a sealed building of pumps and pipes and light rigs—an engineered cave meant to imitate a place that was never meant to be imitated. Temperature held near 93°F. Light timed and angled. Rock shelves poured and tilted to match the original ledge where the fish spawn. Algae cultivated like a crop, because the algae is the food, and the food is the system.

The goal was as stark as anything in conservation: if the last wild population of the Devils Hole Pupfish vanished, there would be another one waiting—a second chance held in reserve.

By the time anyone thought to build a replica, the wild population had already fallen to numbers that don't really function as a population. In 2013 the count hit 35 — the lowest on record. Biologists who had spent decades at that shallow limestone shelf, no bigger than a dining table, were no longer estimating. They were counting individuals. Not estimating. Counting.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has described it plainly: "The Devils Hole Pupfish is one of the rarest fish in the world."

Rarest is a strange word here. It suggests something precious. What it really means is that extinction has already begun and simply hasn't finished yet.

They had tried before—decades earlier—lifting pupfish out of Devils Hole and placing them into nearby springs, into tanks, into simplified versions of their world. The fish would survive for a while, but something always slipped. Courtship broke down. Spawning became irregular. Generations didn't follow. The fish remained alive but stopped behaving like a species.

The fate of the Devils Hole Pupfish once came down to a handful of federal biologists standing at the edge of a dark pool, watching fish that wouldn't eat. Not a policy failure, not a funding gap — just that. A few people trying to convince a few dozen animals to take food.

The problem was starvation. The shallow shelf where the fish fed could not reliably produce enough algae and invertebrates to sustain the population. So scientists intervened. They brought food—baby brine shrimp, commercial fish flakes, spirulina.

They tried hand-feeding them.

Strings, pipettes, food lowered carefully into the water. Whether the fish understood what was being offered is the wrong question — they didn't, not in any meaningful sense. But the biologists kept at it anyway, which says something about where things stood.

Some of these efforts failed. Some made things worse. Pathogens were introduced. The ecosystem reacted in ways no one fully understood.

There is something almost unbearable in the image: government scientists, kneeling at the edge of extinction, trying to hand-feed the rarest fish on Earth.

The work at Ash Meadows got strange in the way that serious efforts sometimes do. It wasn't enough to match the water chemistry. They had to match the angle of the shelf, the way light hit it for only part of the day, the thickness of the algal mat. Sensors tracked oxygen and pH without interruption. Every variable that could be measured was measured. Every variable that could be controlled was controlled.

And still, for years, the fish resisted. They swam. They fed. But they did not fully become themselves.

In 2012, after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake off the coast of Mexico, water inside Devils Hole surged several feet up the walls, slamming across the spawning shelf. Biologists later said that event likely killed a large portion of that year's eggs. A species reduced to a few dozen individuals can lose an entire generation to a tremor on the far side of the continent.

That is the world the replica was meant to replace.

The reaction to the facility, when word spread, was immediate and oddly visceral. The numbers circulated first—millions of dollars, federal funding, a purpose-built structure for a fish most people would never see. Then the tone shifted.

"We're spending millions to save a minnow in a hole?"

"Just let it go extinct."

The old phrase resurfaced, sometimes as a joke, sometimes not: Kill the pupfish.

The fish became, again, a symbol—less an organism than an argument about what matters. Water rights. Federal control. The lingering resentment that a Supreme Court decision—Cappaert v. United States—had once restricted groundwater pumping to protect this same fish.

And because the facility was closed, controlled, difficult to access, the imagination filled the gaps.

People said they were cloning them. People said they were altering them. People said the government was hiding something about the aquifer.

None of it held up, but it didn't need to. The reality—that a handful of scientists were trying to convince a few dozen fish to reproduce inside a fabricated cave—was stranger than most conspiracies.

Buried in a federal planning document is a line that feels almost clinical: "The goal is to establish a second population…to reduce the risk of extinction." — U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

A second population—as if a species that evolved in total isolation could simply be copied and run somewhere else.

Eventually, the fish began to spawn in the replica. Eggs appeared on the artificial shelf. Juveniles survived. Numbers crept upward. By the early 2020s, hundreds of captive fish. The insurance policy seemed to be working. Then spring 2025 — earthquakes, water moving inside Devils Hole, surging across the shelf where the algae grows and the eggs sit. The counts came back low. Thirty-eight wild individuals. The biologists had a protocol for this moment. They had hoped it would stay a protocol.

They took fish from the replica—the engineered cave, the backup world—and introduced 19 captive-raised pupfish into Devils Hole itself. Alongside that, they began carefully calibrated dietary supplementation, informed by what they had learned from the captive population: how much algae, how much nutrition, how to give the fish a margin where there had been none.

The direction reversed. The copy was now feeding the original.

In the months that followed, the wild population showed encouraging signs during the breeding season. The numbers moved in the right direction. That's all that can be said. As of early 2026, the wild population is still precarious, still capable of dropping sharply after a single event. The facility didn't solve that — it was never going to.

What it did was create a margin, a backup, a place where the species could exist while the original hung on. An insurance policy that couldn't replace what it was insuring, but might keep it from disappearing entirely.

The program now runs as a collaboration—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Nevada Department of Wildlife—guided by a strategy that reads as a set of contingencies against loss.

The numbers still swing. Historically, the wild population has ranged from lows in the 30s to peaks above 500. The species remains endangered. The margin remains thin.

And now there are two places where the Devils Hole Pupfish exists.

Between them, the species persists—part wild, part maintained, suspended between a past that made it and a future that may not.

The Limestone Shelf

It starts to come together as a pattern.

The pipes at Stovepipe Wells are opened to the air and everything shuts down. The water is still there, but the pressure is gone. The rooms go dry. The kitchen closes. The bar empties out.

The boardwalk at Salt Creek is torn apart by a flood. The creek is still there. The fish are still there. But access is gone.

At Devils Hole, the argument comes down to inches of water on a limestone shelf.

In Ash Meadows, springs that feel permanent shrink the moment someone starts pumping far enough away. In Tecopa, the water stays but shifts just enough—and a species disappears.

The storms that filled the basin this year, bringing Lake Manly back for a moment, follow the same pattern—water appearing, then disappearing again. Too much, then too little.

And the pupfish sit inside that pattern.

They live at the narrowest edge of what this landscape can hold. When something shifts, they show it first.

The question returns:

Why not kill the pupfish?
Because it would be easy.

One jug of poison. One broken fence. One careless step.

And something that has survived for tens of thousands of years would be gone.

Forever.

Salt Creek

I am back at the bar, sitting at a table in a dark corner. I'm writing about Turrialba Volcano, and about why I believe biodiversity underpins human civilization—that it is the one foundational thing upon which we rest.

While I write about fungus and bacteria and plankton, my mind returns to the pupfish.

We don't depend on them. Not directly.
So why save them?

The Devils Hole Pupfish is a vertebrate in one of the most endangered ecological categories on Earth. In the United States there are only about a thousand freshwater fish species. When one disappears, it is gone.

This one has been evolving in isolation for something like ten to twenty thousand years, a remnant of the Pleistocene lakes that once filled this basin. It carries forward adaptations to heat, oxygen, and water chemistry that exist nowhere else.

Erasing it would mean erasing that.

A story like this—a one-inch fish in a hole in the desert, a "worthless" species—draws people in. It drew me in and kept me thinking about biodiversity for nearly thirty years. It has drawn in scientists, vandals, judges, and presidents. Pister's buckets. Court cases over inches of water. Men with guns and bottles of rum. Fish counted one by one in a cave.

It is a preposterous story. And yet it works.

Salt Creek, 1998. A boardwalk over a narrow channel, fish moving in the shallow water below. I didn't know what I was looking at, not really — I knew the name, knew the basics, but didn't have any way to hold what it meant that they were there at all, persisting in that thin thread of water in the middle of Death Valley.

The story stayed, and over time it became a way of seeing.

The fish—and everything behind them. The water moving under the desert. The algae on a limestone shelf. The narrow margins where a system either holds or collapses.

Once you see it there, it begins to appear everywhere.

What becomes clear is how little room there is for that decision.

Most species don't offer anything obvious. They don't announce their importance. They are simply part of what holds everything else together.

Once you begin deciding which ones matter and which ones don't, the pattern sets quickly.

Things start to drop away.
Quietly at first.

Then all at once. We start making decisions we are not qualified to make. Until the springs that once held entire evolutionary stories run dry or shift just enough. Until we've simplified the world into something that serves the present moment but can no longer surprise or sustain it in the long run.

Out here, the water is already dropping. Not all at once, and not always in ways you can see, but inch by inch—the same way it did at Devils Hole, at Tecopa, and now at Quitobaquito.

Each time it happens, the question returns.

Why keep this?
Why here?
Why not let it go?

And each time, the answer becomes a little easier.

The pressures are higher. The margins are smaller. The number of places where water still holds continues to shrink.

And this is where it happens.
At the edge of a spring.
At the edge of a shelf.

At the edge of a basin where water still rises.

A decision that something stays. Or doesn't.

The moment you decide a species isn't worth keeping, you've already decided what kind of world this is.