The Devils hole pupfish perhaps the rarest of all fish, the world’s loneliest species, and the most isolated animal species on Earth.
And now scientists believe they have finally established where it came from. fish lives in a single limestone cavern, known as Devils Hole in Nye County, Nevada.
Although the cavern opens to the air, the water inside is not connected to any other source.
How did the Devils Hole pupfish come to live inside Devils Hole?
Some 15 metres below the cavern’s opening, is a pool of water, within which every wild Devils pupfish has ever lived.
At one end of this pool is a small limestone shelf, measuring just 3 metres by 6 metres. This shelf is the fish’s only known feeding and spawning ground.
As a result, the pupfish has the smallest geographic range of any vertebrate species.
The fish also survives continually harsh conditions; a constant temperature of 32-33 degrees Celsius, low levels of oxygen, and sporadic changes in water levels.
The fish’s extreme rarity led to it, in 1966, being one of the first species listed under the original US Endangered Species Preservation Act, and the US Supreme Court once ruled in the fish’s favour, banning the pumping of nearby groundwater, that may have threatened its habitat and existence. That ruling strengthened the legal protection later offered to a range of endangered species.
However, such rarity raises a fundamental question; how did the Devils Hole pupfish come to live inside Devils Hole?
No comments:
Post a Comment