#devil's hole

20-foot statue of Satan in Devil's Hole, St. Mary, Jersey

Original caption:

Critically endangered desert pupfish spawning in 2012. (Sharon Keeney)

Excerpt:

Nevada’s endangered desert pupfish are spawning after Alaska’s earthquake sent waves reverberating around their watery home.

Earlier this week, Alaska’s magnitude 7.9 earthquake triggered a small tsunami. Waves only three to eight inches tall washed in along shores from British Columbia through California. But the shaking also rippled across the continent, setting off waves in Devil’s Hole, an 18-foot-long pool that branches deep into the Nevada aquifer. The sloshing water was reflected in the pool, building into waves—also known as a sieche—over a foot tall, Abby Wines writes in a statement for Death Valley National Park. The seiche didn’t cause any damage, but it did disrupt the pool’s most famous inhabitant, the desert pupfish, causing the creatures to unseasonably spawn.

Desert pupfish usually spawn during the spring and the fall but any disruption of their environment can spark another spawning event, biologist Ambre Chaudoin tells Wines. The males turn a brilliant blue when they spawn, while the females are a subdued grey to silvery blue.

Desert pupfish are critically endangered and live only in Devil’s Hole. Though this limestone cavern dives over 400 feet deep below the Mojave Desert, the inch-long fish live in just the upper 80 feet of the pool. The fish eat algae that grows in a shallow sunlit shelf at the top of the hole, and spawn on a tiny shallow shelf.

Researchers were lucky to have had a video camera running when an earthquake in Mexico in 2012 caused the same “seiche” effect in Devil’s Hole:

Dennis Oppenheim

Devil's Hole, 1979

Winter Death Valley Trip: Day Four

Devil’s Hole, home of the critically endangered Devil’s Hole Pupfish, in Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge in Nevada.

Devil’s Hole also infamously reacts to seismic events half a world away in countries like Japan. Pretty cool!