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/.
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More drivel.
Probably not even good bait.
There are now 92 Devils Hole pupfish…..
and they have been line bred for thousands of years
…and the idiots wonder why they are in decline
The concept of “line breeding” does not apply very well to desert fishes in general. They have evolved to stay very stable with small isolated populations with the ability to change rapidly when conditions change. Don’t put much stock in these cited population numbers. They are cherry picked. In any given year, the population can range from 400+ to 70. The only real limit on numbers is water volume.
This species is trying very hard to go extinct. Let’s just let them go quietly into the night. As a heavily inbred species, it is amazing they are here at all.
Hey, it would probably only cost a few billions of dollars to divert some water from Kalifornia and crossbreed the critters with the Delta Smelt. We’d have a more robust species in a bigger fishbowl. Course we’d have to add a billion to build an earthquake spillway under the high speed rail line, and some fish-neutral pumps to get the water over the mountains, but nothing is too good for our friends the pupfish. I remember having one as a kid. breaded, on a stick, at the county fair. Yummy.
Do I really, really need a /sarc tag?
Yesterday I found two garter snakes in my shed. I think it is due to global warming.
OMG! Not the Devils Hole pupfish! There I was worrying about the New World Order, Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola, vaccinations, Smart Meters and other stupid stuff.
I wonder how well they’d do as a warm tank species in the aquarium trade…
Not to well. They are a bit of a pain in the butt. Experienced fish keepers on the other hand would find them worth the effort, but moon bat legalities are preventing anyone from owning them except the benighted few. Lefties HATE the pet trade and do everything within their evil power to destroy it.
I recall that biologists were making a good living fretting over pupfish forty years ago when I first visited Death Valley. Some things never change.
Pupfish angst is a career for some fortunate academics.
You are talking about C. macularius in the Salton Sea. This is really funny as the population there is the result of a man caused flood that greatly expanded its habitat. All of the hand wringing was over Archocentrus nigrofasciata. The goal was to use the plight of the pupfish as a pretext to go after Aquarium hobbyists.
I guess that is why we don’t remember the “Aquarium Hobbyist Insurrection”.
Put down by good planning !
Anyhow… the article says that ” climate change could affect the ecosystem within the pool.”, and syas “they ” know how, but I am not seeing it.
It’s a hot spring fed from underground in a cave. I don’t see the connection to anything that passes for “climate science”. Apparently it is just too attractive to hitch your wagon to the AGW foodchain rather than admit you are doing geology or biology, or research into some other field.
Reminds me of the the press releases (that were called scientific papers, pal reviewed no doubt) that showed climate change was causing viruses in toads or frogs. Turned out that the viruses were introduced by the “researchers” who were studying them. Same with penguins in Antarctica. Seems the “researchers” will study every species until they are all killed off by the caring researchers. Or until the money (grants) runs out, whichever happens first.
If you go to Furnace Creek from LV/Pahrump. you go right by Ash Meadows. Really interesting place. There are several springs with a total output of 10,000 gpm. There is no outflow, with a reservoir and some reclamation projects (it was a farming area) taking the surface water.
BTW, there are three species of pupfish at Ash Meadows.
As a Geology student at UNLV in the early 70’s the pup fish were threatened then due to water being taken for irrigation. They transplanted some of the fish to a warm spring near the Colorado River but they became much larger due to better living conditions. I also remember Devil’s Hole was entered illegally by two divers who never returned. The water was in the 90’s and you hardly know you are in water due to the temperature. The two scuba divers went down and failed to use a line to follow back to the entrance of the hole. Search teams spent several days trying to locate the two divers, but they were never found.