Pupfish in Valley of Death

The pupfish is isolated, so it is not important in the food chain or the ecology of Death Valley. It does not appear to be involved in on-going evolutionary developments. It is out there, all by itself, a left over from long ago, from other times.

The fact that the fish is a left over is important to scientists and curiousity seekers, but probably not to anyone else. It is strange that any fish could have survived in the aptly named Death Valley. Once upon a time, Death Valley did support a lake, the remains of which are visible as dried up salt beds in low lying places. There are miles and miles of salt mixed with clay, baked into cracked clumps. During the last Ice Age, that was a lake. At that time, a few hundred miles to the west, the La Brea tar pits were catching saber toothed tigers and wooly mammoths. Since then, the pupfish somehow became acclimated to extremely saline, metal-rich hot waters. It's like living in the volcanic hot springs that supply the resort industry in Calistoga, Calif. There aren't many fish that accomplished, which makes them interesting examples of evolutionary adaptation.

It would be sad if they disappeared, but it wouldn't be earth shaking. It is not clear the pupfish have any significance in present-day ecology or evolution. They are among 'the least of these,' as the Biblical phrase has it. Local human residents are willing to trash the pupfish in their desperate need for water. According to the LAT article, it was people pumping out the water that pushed the pupfish into near extinction. That, however, is a clue to their importance.

The significance of the pupfish, and why we should save it, is this: they are the evidence that we've pushed that environment as far as it can go. The pupfish is the desert's canary warning us of imminent danger ahead. If we go further anyway, and bring the end of time to these hapless fish, we are unlikely to find ourselves persecuted by the Furies or Nature. They'll just be gone, just like thousands of other species before them. While they may not be able to seek justice for themselves, the pattern of their victimization may avenge them and those similarly situated.

We don't know whether what we are doing to pupfish, snail darters and thousands of other species is important or not. We don't know how they are involved in network of living things on this planet, our Gaia. Maybe whatever we are doing to them is also what we are doing to other species which do matter. Maybe the pupfish don't count on some galactic scale of being; maybe we don't count on the galactic scale, either.

It's easy to squash the life out of some bug we don't care about. It's just as easy for some alien to squash the life out of Homo sapiens it never knew or cared about.

I don't know whether or not it matters. What I do know is the principle of things, once established, have a funny way of applying to things and places we never thought about. To ourselves, for example.