SHOSHONE, Calif. — How the Devil’s Hole pupfish has survived for centuries in a spalike cistern cloistered by a barren rock mountain in Death Valley National Park remains a biological mystery.
The world’s rarest, most inbred fish clings to existence in the smallest geographic range of any vertebrate: the shallow end of an oxygen-deprived pool 10 feet wide, 70 feet long and more than 500 feet deep.
In early 2013, its numbers plunged to 35, and biologists feared the species long regarded as a symbol of the desert conservation movement would be gone within a year.
