One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.
The Devils Hole pupfish is a classic Stockholm species. When the water level in the cavern dropped in the late ’60s, the sham shelf and the lightbulbs installed by the National Park Service kept the fish alive. After the courts put an end to pumping near the cavern, the water level crept back up, but the aquifer never fully recovered. Today, the water level in the cavern is still about a foot lower than it should be. The ecosystem in the pool has, as a consequence, shifted and the food web frayed. Since 2006, the Park Service has been delivering supplemental meals, including brine shrimp and fairy shrimp—Grubhub for fish.
As for the pupfish in the hundred-thousand-gallon refuge tank, they wouldn’t last a season without the ministrations of Gumm, Feuerbacher, and the other fish whisperers. The conditions in the tank are meant to mimic nature as closely as possible, except in the one way that leaves the actual Devils Hole so vulnerable. The simulacrum lies beyond the reach of human disruption because it’s totally human.
There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands. As for the forms of assistance they rely on, these, too, are legion. They include, in addition to supplemental feeding and captive breeding: double-clutching, headstarting, enclosures, exclosures, managed burns, chelation, guided migration, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, predator-avoidance training, and conditioned taste aversion. Every year, this list grows. “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new,” observed Thoreau.
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The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is twenty-three thousand acres in area, or roughly the size of the Bronx. Within its borders live twenty-six species that can be found nowhere else in the world. According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents “the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the second greatest in all of North America.”
That harsh conditions should beget diversity is textbook Darwinism. In a desert, populations become physically and then reproductively isolated, much as they do on archipelagoes. The fish of the Mojave and the neighboring Great Basin Desert are, in this sense, like the finches of the Galápagos; each inhabits its own little island of water in a sea of sand.
Doubtless many of these “islands” were sucked dry before anyone bothered to record what was living in them. As Mary Austin observed in 1903, it is the “destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.” Among those creatures that lasted long enough for their extinction to be noted were: the Pahranagat spinedace (last collected in 1938), the Las Vegas dace (last seen in 1940), the Ash Meadows poolfish (last seen in 1948), the Raycraft Ranch poolfish (last seen in 1953), and the Tecopa pupfish (missing since 1970).
Another desert pupfish, the Owens pupfish, was thought to be extinct, only to be rediscovered in 1964. By 1969, it was just barely hanging on, in a pond the size of a rec room, when, for reasons no one could quite explain, the pond shrank to a puddle. Someone alerted Phil Pister, a biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, who rushed to the site—a spot known as Fish Slough. Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets.
“I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pister spent the next several decades working to save the Owens pupfish and also the Devils Hole pupfish. People would often ask him why he spent so much time on such insignificant animals.
“What good are pupfish?” they’d demand.
“What good are you?” Pister would respond.
In the Mojave, I went to see as many fish as I could—island-hopping, as it were. In a pond not far from Devils Hole lives the Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish (Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes). The pond is surrounded by a landscape so sere it brought to mind Manly’s misadventures; just walking the couple of hundred yards from the road, I thought: even today, a person could die in the Mojave and no one would notice. The Ash Meadows pupfish, which look like paler versions of the Devils Hole pupfish, were darting around—once again, either flirting or fighting; I couldn’t tell.
Thirty miles away, in the tiny town of Shoshone, California, lives another subspecies, the Shoshone pupfish (Cyprinodon nevadensis shoshone). Like the Owens pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish was believed to be extinct, then was rediscovered, in this case in a culvert bordering an RV park. Susan Sorrells owns the RV park, as well as the town’s only restaurant and its sole store. With the help of various state agencies, she has created a set of pools for the Shoshone pupfish, which have proved a great deal more adaptable than their Devils Hole cousins.
“They went from being extinct to prolific,” Sorrells told me. The hot-springs system that feeds the pupfish ponds also feeds the local swimming pool, which I cooled off in one afternoon along with a bearded man. The man, I was unnerved to see when he turned around, had two large swastikas tattooed on his back.
The town of Pahrump also used to have a fish of its own, the Pahrump poolfish (Empetrichthys latos), which still exists, though, sadly, not in Pahrump. The fish’s original habitat was a spring-fed pond into which someone, either by design or by chance, released goldfish. The goldfish flourished, while the poolfish crashed. In the ’60s, groundwater pumping made a bad situation worse. Just as the pond was about to dry up entirely, in 1971, a University of Nevada biologist named Jim Deacon staged a last-minute rescue. Like Pister, he carried the remaining fish out in a pail. He managed to save thirty-two of them—or at least so the story goes.
Since its rescue, the Pahrump poolfish has lived on in an aquatic diaspora, wandering—or, really, being trucked—from one pond of exile to another. Kevin Guadalupe, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, is the fish’s Moses. I met up with him at his office, in Las Vegas, which was decorated with a poster showing Nevada’s forty species of native fish. “Just about everything on there is endangered,” he said, gesturing toward the poster. When he handed me his business card, I noticed it had a pine-nut-sized picture of a poolfish on it.
In the flesh, Pahrump poolfish are about two inches long, with dark, yellow-streaked bodies and yellowish fins. Like Devils Hole pupfish, they evolved in a tough environment where, by default, they were the apex predators. Much of Guadalupe’s job involves trying to prevent the poolfish from encountering anything like a real predator. As people move more species into the desert, new emergencies keep arising.
“A lot of the time, we’re running around with our hair on fire,” Guadalupe told me. At Spring Mountain Ranch, a state park about fifty miles from Pahrump, we visited the shell of a lake that had been home to around ten thousand poolfish. (The ranch once belonged to Howard Hughes, though by the time he bought it he was too paranoid about germs to leave his hotel suite in Las Vegas.) People had dumped the contents of their aquariums into the lake, and, unable to cope with the resulting predation, the poolfish had practically been eliminated. In an effort to get rid of the other introduced species—the poolfish were, of course, themselves tran
splants—the lake had been completely drained. Its red-clay bottom now lay cracked and baking in the sun. As the environmental historian J. R. McNeill has observed, paraphrasing Marx: “Men make their own biosphere, but they do not make it just as they please.”
At Desert National Wildlife Refuge, about forty miles from Pahrump, we toured another pond under siege.
“There’s one over there,” Guadalupe said, pointing to what looked like a small lobster poking its head out from under some muck. It was a red swamp crayfish. Red swamp crayfish are native to the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to the Florida panhandle. They’ve been moved around a lot because people like to eat them. For their part, red swamp crayfish like to eat poolfish. To give the fish a chance, Guadalupe had rigged up fake reefs for them to spawn on. These were made of sleek plastic cylinders with tufts of artificial grass sticking out of the top. Guadalupe was hoping that the cylinders would be too slippery for any hungry crayfish to climb.
The last poolfish refuge we hit was in a park in Las Vegas. By the time we got there, it was around noon and a million degrees and no one in their right mind was outside.
That night, my last in Nevada, I stayed on the Strip, at the Paris, in a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. This being Vegas, the tower rose out of a swimming pool. The water was the blue of antifreeze. From somewhere near the pool, a sound system pumped out a beat that reached me, dull and throbbing, through the sealed windows of the seventh floor. I really wanted a drink. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back down to the lobby, past Le Concierge, Les Toilets, and La Réception, to find a faux French bar. I thought of the Devils Hole pupfish in their simulated cavern. I wondered: is this how they felt in their darker moments?
2
Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean while watching TV. When she was in elementary school, she would sit in front of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, mesmerized. The colors, the shapes, the diversity of survival strategies—life beneath the waves seemed to her more spectacular than life above. Without knowing much beyond what she’d learned from the series, she decided that she would become a marine biologist.
“Even though Cousteau was coming through the television, he unveiled the oceans in a way that nobody else had been able to,” she told me.
Gates, who grew up in England, went on to study at Newcastle University, where marine-science classes were taught against the backdrop of the North Sea. She took a course on corals and, once again, was dazzled. Her professor explained that corals, which are tiny animals, have, living inside their cells, even tinier plants. Gates wondered how such an arrangement was possible. “I couldn’t quite get my head around the idea,” she said. In 1985, she moved to Jamaica to study corals and their symbionts.
It was an exciting moment to be doing such work. New techniques in molecular biology were making it possible to look at life at its most intimate level. But it was also a disturbing time. Reefs in the Caribbean were dying. Some were being done in by development, others by overfishing and pollution. Two of the region’s dominant reef-builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn coral—were being devastated by an ailment that became known as white-band disease. (Both are now classified as critically endangered.) Over the course of the 1980s, something like half of the Caribbean’s coral cover disappeared.
Gates continued her research at UCLA and then at the University of Hawaii. All the while, the outlook for reefs was growing grimmer. Climate change was pushing ocean temperatures beyond many species’ tolerance. In 1998, a so-called global bleaching event, caused by a spike in water temperatures, killed more than fifteen percent of corals worldwide. Another global bleaching event took place in 2010. Then, in 2014, a marine heat wave set in and didn’t let up for almost three years.
Compounding the dangers of warming were profound changes in ocean chemistry. Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions were making the seas more acidic. One team of researchers calculated that a few more decades of rising emissions would cause reefs to “stop growing and begin dissolving.” Another group predicted that, by the middle of the twenty-first century, visitors to places like the Great Barrier Reef would find nothing more than “rapidly eroding rubble banks.” Gates couldn’t bring herself to go back to Jamaica; so much of what she loved about the place had been lost.
But Gates was, by her own description, a “glass half full sort of person.” She noticed that some reefs that had been given up for dead were bouncing back. These included reefs she knew intimately. What if there were qualities that made certain corals more robust than others? And what if those traits could be identified? Then, perhaps, there’d be something for a marine biologist to do, besides just wring her hands. If it were possible to breed hardier corals, it might be possible to reengineer the world’s reefs to survive acidification and climate change.
Gates wrote up her idea and submitted it to a contest called the Ocean Challenge. She won. The prize money—$10,000—was barely enough to keep a research lab in pipettes, but the foundation that sponsored the contest invited her to submit a more detailed proposal. This time around, she received a $4 million grant. News stories about the grant suggested that Gates and her colleagues were planning to create “super coral.” Gates embraced the concept. One of her graduate students drew up a logo: a branching coral with a big red S on what might, anthropocentrically, be called its chest.
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I met Gates in the spring of 2016. This was about a year after she’d received the super-coral grant and, as it happened, not long after she’d been appointed director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. The institute occupies its own little island, Moku o Lo‘e, in Kaneohe Bay, off the coast of Oahu. (If you’ve ever watched Gilligan’s Island, you’ve seen Moku o Lo‘e in the opening sequence.) There’s no public transportation to Moku o Lo‘e; visitors just show up at a dock, and provided the institute’s boatman is expecting them, he’ll motor over.
Gates greeted me when I disembarked, and we walked to her office, which was very spare and very white. Its windows looked out over the bay and, beyond it, to a military base—Marine Corps Base Hawaii. (The base was bombed by the Japanese a few minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor.) Gates explained that Kaneohe Bay had been the inspiration for the super-coral project. For much of the twentieth century, it had been used as a dump for sewage. By the 1970s, its reefs had mostly collapsed. Seaweed had taken over, and the water in the bay had turned an eerily bright green. But then a sewage-treatment plant came online. Later, the state teamed up with the Nature Conservancy and the University of Hawaii to devise a contraption—basically, a barge equipped with giant vacuum hoses—to suck algae off the seabed. Gradually, the reefs started to revive. There are now more than fifty so-called patch reefs in the bay.
“Kaneohe Bay is a great example of a highly disturbed setting where individuals persisted,” Gates said. “If you think about the coral that survived, those are the most robust genotypes. So that means what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I ended up spending a week with Gates on Moku o Lo‘e. One day, we looked at corals through an enormous laser-scanning microscope. Gates showed me the arrangement that as a student she’d found so puzzling. I could see, nestled inside the coral’s tiny cells, their tinier plant symbionts. Another day, we went snorkeling. It was two years into the marine heat wave that had begun in 2014, and many of the coral colonies in the bay were a ghostly white. Most of them, Gates observed, probably wouldn’t make it. But others were still colorful—tan or brown or greenish. These corals were doing fine. “It’s really heartening to see these reefs be so resilient,” she told me.
On a third day, we visited an array of outdoor tanks in which corals gathered from the bay were being raised under precisely controlled conditions. The aim wasn’t to provide an optimal environment, as at the pupfish tank, but more or less the reverse: the corals were being raised under calibrated stress. Those
that thrived—or at least survived—would be crossbred and their offspring thrown back into the tanks for more stress. The corals subject to this selective pressure would, it was hoped, undergo a kind of “assisted evolution.” These corals could then be used to seed the reefs of the future.
“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” People could either “assist” corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die. Anything else, in her view, was wishful thinking. “A lot of people want to go back to something,” she said. “They think, if we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was.
“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”
Gates was so charismatic that even though I’d come to Moku o Lo‘e with a notebook full of doubts, I felt inspired by her. A couple of times, after she had finished for the day at the institute, we went out for dinner, and eventually we talked our way past the relationship of a reporter and her subject to something approaching friendship. I was arranging to visit Gates again, to see how the super corals were coming along, when she wrote to tell me she was dying. Only she didn’t put it that way. Instead, she said that she had lesions on her brain, that she was going to Mexico for treatment, and that, whatever the disease was, she was going to beat it.
Under a White Sky Page 8
