From the University of Nevada, Reno | A claim that more likely has to do with natural drought cycles, fresh water influx, and the PDO than it does with the universal boogeyman “climate change”.
University of Nevada, Reno and Desert Research Institute research shows rare fish struggling to survive
RENO, Nev. – Climate change is hurting reproduction of the endangered Devils Hole pupfish, threatening the survival of this rare species that has numbered as few as 35 individuals, new research by the University of Nevada, Reno and Desert Research Institute shows.
Scientists report that geothermal water on a small shelf near the surface of an isolated cavern in the Nevada desert where the pupfish live is heating up as a result of climate change and is likely to continue heating to dangerous levels.
The hotter water, which now reaches more than 93 degrees, has shortened by one week the amount of time pupfish larvae have to hatch during the optimal recruitment periods. The recruitment period is the 10 weeks during which water temperatures are conducive to egg hatching and sufficient food is available to sustain the newly hatched larvae. This decrease contributed to the decline of the adult pupfish population, according to a scientific paper published in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Caption: Scuba divers conduct fish research at Devils Hole, an isolated geothermal water-filled limestone cavern in the Nevada desert. The aquifer-fed pool in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a detached unit of Death Valley National Park, is the habitat for the only naturally occurring population of the endangered fish. It is an extreme environment, with water temperatures and dissolved oxygen concentrations near their lethal limits for fish.
“Climate change is making it harder for the Devils Hole pupfish to survive and has most likely contributed to the decline we have seen,” said Mark Hausner, a hydrologist at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, Nev., and lead author of the paper, “Life in a Fishbowl: Prospects for the endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) in a changing climate.”
Devils Hole, in the Mojave Desert, will also likely become less hospitable to the pupfish as climate change continues to warm the planet, he said. The new research found that increasing temperatures will likely reduce the pupfish’s optimal recruitment period by another two weeks by mid-century. Higher temperatures could also affect the availability of food for young pupfish, leading to fewer adult fish.
“There is no question that the temperature is going to rise on the shallow shelf, and there is no question that the fish are going to be affected,” said Scott Tyler, lead scientist in the project, co-author of the paper and a professor of hydrological sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“While the population of the pupfish has declined, we are hoping they are in a period of recovery,” Kevin Wilson, aquatic ecologist and a member of the research team from the Pahrump Field Office of Death Valley National Park, said. “Climate change is threatening the already small population size.”
Devils Hole is a water-filled limestone cavern in the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a detached unit of Death Valley National Park. It is an extreme environment, with water temperatures and dissolved oxygen concentrations near their lethal limits for most fish.
The iridescent blue, one-inch-long pupfish have lived in the top 80 feet of the water-filled cavern for more than 10,000 years.
There are now 92 Devils Hole pupfish observed living in the geothermal pool. The population, which fluctuates throughout the year, is down from 171 fish a decade ago (according to seasonal counts). The population is down from 553 fish when the population counts began in 1972, according to the National Park Service.
“This is a fish that does live in a fishbowl, an incredibly hostile fishbowl, and you can’t move the fishbowl,” Tyler said. “This is a species that can’t adapt or change or leave to go to a better environment, though it’s most likely gone through tremendous genetic bottlenecks in its more than 10,000 years of evolution.”
Tyler and his team, with grants from the National Park Service, Nevada Department of Wildlife and the Death Valley Natural History Association, used fiber-optic cable distributed temperature-sensing equipment, pioneered by Tyler, to monitor temperature changes in the more than 400-foot deep geothermal fissure in the desert. They used current and historic data to create a numerical model, using the same equations used in fluid dynamics and aerodynamics for designing Formula-one race cars and airplane wings, to chart thermal mixing of the water within the aquifer.
The scientists combined climate projections, models of water circulation in the deep, water-filled fissure, and food web ecology to understand how climate change could affect the ecosystem within the pool. The model estimated optimal pupfish spawning periods based on projections about how much the environment will change and how much food will be available under different climate scenarios.
“The techniques used to model the impacts of climate change for the Devils Hole pupfish can be applied to other species in other desert locations to see how they might respond to the changing climate,” Tyler said.
The research team includes Kevin Wilson and Bailey Gaines of the Pahrump Field Office of Death Valley National Park; Francisco Suárez from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; and Gary Scoppettone of the Western Fisheries Research Center of the United States Geological Survey. The American Geophysical Union posted a similar story about the research on their GeoSpace blog at on the AGU Blogosphere at http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2014/08/26/heating-fishbowl-climate-change-threatens-endangered-devils-hole-pupfish/.
This species relies on geothermally heated water. How would air temperatures affect them, even given that the area has actually warmed (which is not proven)?
As a solid environmentalist I cannot help but wonder if all the research into the poor pupfish is causing their decline.
In the desert.
There are around 10 MILLION species of animals on Earth.
Extinction is a natural process that has been going on for Billions of years.
There have only been about 50 animal extinctions over the past 100 years, and not ONE can be attributed to Global Warming. They’ve been caused by: over hunting, introduction of non-indigenous species, habitat destruction, etc…
I can’t believe the CAGW acolytes still use this silly “CAGW mass extinction” meme, when there is absolutely no empirical evidence to justify it…
This “unprecedented CAGW extinction” (TM) meme is complete hokum used to scare and deceive “useful idiots”, that will believe whatever they’re told to believe, regardless of empirical evidence that negates their blatant propaganda.
Heh, now that’s a possibility, the pupfish going extinct because their pool is getting continually disturbed by the boatloads of researchers studying and counting them, nothing to do with climate.
Or maybe it does have to do with climate, does anyone know if there’s a correlation between the number of researchers in the pool and the temperature?
Ouch
Such an eye-roller moment it hurts.
You mean that in thousands of years the climate never experienced more severe conditions than at present, such as during the megadroughts of the Medieval Warm Period, when it was warmer and dryer than at present?
Next thing you know, they’ll be anointed as our new “canaries in a coal mine”.
It’s a big aquarium. Control the temperature and sparge air into the water for oxygen.
Well get a class of about 20 fourth graders, and some worms, maybe a gallon of ice cream, and they’ll get all of those pupfish out of that boiling hole, then we won’t have to worry about them any more. They probably taste just like chicken.
” Climate change is hurting reproduction of the endangered Devils Hole pupfish, threatening the survival of this rare species”
Once again someone gets published because they support the doom and gloom inevitability of AGW. The certainty they use makes the average person believe it’s true and not just another theory, to support another theory. But I believe most people are catching on because a common satirical retort to something/anything going wrong is “climate change caused it”.
Provided governments continue with halfhearted reactions to the CAGW creation without going overboard we can be tolerant. I have to admit that it has led to a few good environmental decisions and technological developments.
A side effect of the CAGW scare is entertainment. Many of the claims are so ridiculous that they are just downright funny (extinction of the coffee plant (panic!), melting of the earth’s mantle and the increases in insurrections because it’s too darn hot were some of the more memorable ones for me).
Other claims, such as this story, are simply sad and disturbing. How can a scientist with any credibility and sensitivity justify the amount of disruption to the habitat that this picture shows, and without any logic or proof make the claims that they have. These are not scientists, and we will lose another species not because of CAGW but because Dr. Billy-Bob accidentally blew the last specimen out his snorkel.
My first bit of skeptism began when I saw it was a geothermal pool. Then I saw they used climate projections in their study. Those wouldn’t be from the same climate models that have been overestimating temperatures would they?
I wonder if the pupfish react to the urine the divers leave in there(I sure don’t see any portapotties in that environment, and they really should drink a lot a water in Death valley.) And what of the effect of the divers skin oils, deodorants, soap and shampoo on the water quality? The neoprene wetsuits?
Remember what they did to all those endangered desert tortoises when they lost funding? Hundreds were euthanized. Probably best to just leave them alone to die.
‘“There is no question that the temperature is going to rise on the shallow shelf, and there is no question that the fish are going to be affected,” said Scott Tyler, lead scientist in the project, co-author of the paper and a professor of hydrological sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno.’
“There is no question … ” Huh? This is a scientist?
“Genetic bottlenecks” means the population was nearly wiped out so badly it removed genetic diversity on more than one occasion. When this happens due to one constraint, the remaining genetic pool may lack the robustness to overcome another constraint.
After one, the natural course is either a population recovers or it goes extinct. They say the species cannot adapt or change, thus likely it is highly inbred, genetic diversity about nil. Extinction is thus the likely natural result.
Why do people who care so much about “Nature” fight so hard against what is natural?
More than 10,000 years of evolution? Practically nothing. That sounds suspiciously like the start of the current interglacial, as if this was a population left behind during the warm-up. Seems most likely they could be traced by their genes and shown to be a genetic subset of a species found elsewhere, that has large and healthy populations.
This propaganda dressed as science did not bother to mention that almost all declines in C.diabolis can be directly attributed to the activities of researchers, as some commentators have speculated. Sometime in the mid 2000’s, one third of the population was wiped out by equipment that researchers had left behind washing into the sink during a flash flood.
BTW, 94F is not unusual at all.
The Devil’s hole pupfishFish can’t cope with climate* ? Sooo the fish obviously went extinct during the Holocene optimum, the Minoan warm period , the Roman warm period and the Medieval warm period and has recovered from being dead just in time to go extinct again ?
* ( change is implied , there’s no such beastie as a static climate )
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
August 28, 2014 at 10:27 pm
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The concept of genetic bottleneck does not really apply to many families in Cyprinodontiformes. The scientist responsible for second paragraph in your quote was incredibly ignorant or deliberately misleading. One of the problems with this species is that attempts to establish refugia populations sometimes fail, because the species soon adapts to new conditions. That is how C. macularius complex species managed to flourish in the desert. It adapts and adapts rapidly.
One of the main constraints on the population of all species of Cyprinodon, is water volume. These are nasty and highly aggressive fishes that will tear each other to shreds when they get to crowded.
Just like the glaciers of West antarctic peninsula, those water hole have been living on borrowed time as the climate warmed.
That is the sinister beauty of the term Climate Change. We want to think that the earth has been and will always be as it was in the 20th century. And when it is not in the 21st, we naturally look for a cause. Warmunistas realized that fallacy and renamed global warming to climate change. Diabolical.
bye bye fishies. hello CAGW.
Evolution or Extinction.
Don’t they teach Darwinism at the University of Nevada?
Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by man to control nature. Its arrogant meddling. If nature wants this fish gone, then let it go gracefully, doesn’t anyone understand this type of meddling is what got us all these problems to begin with….George Carlin
There are two gaping holes in this research,
How did the scientists involved feel about the fish ? what were their emotions ?
How scared were they, were they scared a bit, a lot , scared witless ?
wonder how much? money
and how long for?
these idiots have been wasting time an tax funds on a bloody fish that serves NO useful purpose at all to anyone?
and btw theyre in a nice closed spot dont birds and other critters like a fishy meal every now n then?
Poor evolutionary choices have consequences. 😉
If we want to protect the Pupfish, instead of limiting our CO2, perhaps we should limit our government research grants.