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Consider the Pupfish
How the Trump administration gutted the Endangered Species Act — and what that means for the rarest fish on Earth
On the night of April 30, 2016, three young men who had spent the evening drinking rum and shooting rabbits in the Nevada desert crashed a customized Yamaha Rhino — an off-road vehicle that looks something like a high-powered golf cart — into the chain-link fence surrounding Devils Hole, a water-filled cavern on a detached parcel of Death Valley National Park, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Trenton Sargent, 27 at the time, hopped out of the vehicle and blasted the surveillance camera mounted on the fence with a shotgun: blam! The commotion should have triggered a motion sensor, which should have triggered an alarm, but it didn’t. A barn owl that had been roosting nearby had kept setting the security system off, and rather than disturb the bird, National Park Service staff had disabled it, according to a 2019 High Country News account of the break-in.
Sargent and his buddies hopped the fence and stumbled their way down into Devils Hole, toward the habitat that fencing was meant to protect. Sargent took off his clothes and plunged into the warm, hot-tub-like water, onto a small, shallowly submerged limestone shelf where the Devils Hole pupfish — an inch-long, iridescent blue fish that…
