“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 c
louds, 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.)
Under a White Sky Page 7
