A tiny Mojave desert fish that was once thought extinct — and might still be — is getting a bit more habitat in a small town near Death Valley National Park. The Shoshone pupfish, a subspecies of desert pupfish that lived in springs along the Amargosa River near the town of Shoshone, was declared extinct in 1970 after repeated surveys failed to find any of the tiny fish. In the mid-1980s, biologists were surprised to find a population of pupfish in a drainage canal that closely resembled the Shoshone pupfish. Those biologists tentatively declared the subspecies “rediscovered” in 1986, though there’s a chance that what they found was actually a new population of the closely related Amargosa pupfish.
Whether the pupfish belong to the Shoshone or Amargosa subspecies, their numbers have grown to the point where a few of them have been moved to a publicly accessible pond where tourists can admire them. And much of the credit for their recovery goes to a determined rural landowner.
Best known in the desert for the tiny population in the Devils Hole spring in Nevada, pupfish are a diverse group of tiny, two-inch fish in the genus Cyprinodon. Split into a number of closely related species and subspecies as the larger desert lakes and rivers that made up their Ice Age habitat slowly dried up, pupfish have in many cases found themselves restricted to incredibly small ranges: a spring here, an outflow there. They make do remarkably well considering they’re restricted to wet spots in the desert: as long as they have enough water they thrive by eating cyanobacteria, along with occasional small invertebrates. Continue reading this article by Chris Clarke reported by kcet.org….
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