January 26, 2016—The critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish of Death Valley have long been considered the struggling survivors of the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago – trapped in a dwindling watering hole in the midst of the most hellish desert on Earth.
But a new genetic analysis confirms that the fish known to science as Cyprinodon diabolis has managed the diabolically impossible: it seems to have arrived at Devil’s Hole more recently and somehow mixed with other pupfish species of other desert springs within the last few centuries.
This apparently miraculous feat, while being very mysterious in itself, could actually demystify another inexplicable fact about the Devil’s Hole minions that has long bedeviled scientists: how such a small population of fish living in a body of water the length and width of a couple of school buses could have survived for thousands of years without succumbing to inbreeding or the occasional mega drought.
“It’s one of the most ridiculous fish habitats in the world,” said Christopher Martin of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the lead author of the new study which appears online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Indeed, at 10 feet wide and 70 feet long (3.5 by 22 meters) the steep-sided Devil’s Hole is the smallest range of any vertebrate in the world.