I'm here at the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and today I'll be meeting up with the folks from the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

I'm excited to learn all about this amazing area and see the sites.

I hope you're ready, too.

♪♪♪ I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪ Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is a unique and ecologically significant area encompassing over 24,000 acres.

The area was created in 1984 as a way to protect its rare and endemic species, some of which are found nowhere else on the planet.

The area supports a diverse array of habitats, from spring-fed wetlands to desert uplands.

This unique combination of habitats supports an extraordinary array of plant and animal life, making it a critical site for biodiversity conservation in the Mojave Desert.

The day started by meeting Kevin.

He's from the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

We headed out into the huge system of boardwalks.

These boardwalks are in place for visitors to best enjoy the refuge and protect the landscape and habitat.

Our first stop was Crystal Spring.

Here we caught up with another member of the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife team, Ambre.

(Kevin Desroberts) Hi, Amber.

Connor, I'd like to introduce you to my colleague, Ambre Chaudoin.

She's a fish biologist for the refuge.

-Great to meet you, Ambre.

-Good to me you.

-Being a fish biologist, I imagine you work here next to the bodies of water a lot.

(Ambre Chaudoin) I do indeed.

-What makes this particular body of water special?

-So this is Crystal Spring.

This is, by discharge, our largest spring on the refuge.

It discharges about 2,800 gallons per minute from the carbonate aquifer that's beneath our feet.

-I want to make sure I'm correct.

You said 2,800 gallons per minute?

-Slightly over, actually.

-That is incredible when you actually think about the sheer volume of water that's coming through.

-Indeed, it is.

And this is about 15 feet deep, and it is part of a larger system that we call our Crystal Spring complex.

-What's the temperature of the water like?

-It comes out at 87 degrees Celsius, geothermally heated.

-Oh, that sounds beautiful.

So you know it sounds great to me, right?

But I imagine that humans are not allowed in that water.

-They are not.

It's a very sensitive ecosystem, and it houses a number of species that are found here and no place else, including our endangered Ash Meadows amargoss pupfish.

And so we ask that you do not swim in the spring.

-There's a number of different species that aren't found anywhere else in the world, other than literally right behind us, which is amazing when you think about that.

What other types of animals and species do you find there?

-So we have an endemic species of springsnail.

It's a pebblesnail.

It's called Pyrgulopsis crystalis, and it's only found in a narrow band around the orifice of the spring and nowhere else, not in any other springs even on the refuge.

-Is it part of your job to look after those snails?

-It is.

We survey and monitor them on a regular basis.

-Are there any natural predators in this area?

-So there are no natural predators in the aquatic system, but there are a lot of non-natural predators.

So invasive species, unfortunately like many of the springs in the refuge, we have them in here.

We have crayfish, mosquitofish, and the big one right now is green sunfish.

So those were introduced a number of years ago, and they are much larger than the pupfish, and they will-- they will eat them.

We also have bullfrogs in the system.

So one of the things that we are working on with our university and agency partners is a rapid detection for non-native species.

And so it's really intensive to go out here and throw traps in and monitor on a regular basis as often as we need to.

And so one of the things that we are developing with our partners is a protocol that uses eDNA, which stands for environmental DNA.

Basically, when there's an animal, a fish say, in the system, they will slough off skin cells and whatnot.

Just like you and I, our skin cells fall off of us, animals will do the same thing in the aquatic environment.

And the methods and techniques that we use for that will pick up those DNA fragments and be able to provide what we call an early detection for rapid response of these non-native species that are a problem for our native species.

And so we're really looking forward to the product of that.

-That's incredible.

So it'll basically alert a bell, and that bell will ring and say, Hey, there's something that's not supposed to be in here.

You can come get it out and protect the native species?

-Exactly.

-Automatically?

-Automatically, with just a water sample.

-I love that.

That's incredible.

This area is beautiful.

I would love to see more.

Where should we go next?

-Point of Rocks would be the best next place to go.

-We can see Kings Pool there as well, with some of the best pupfish viewing on the refuge.

-I'd love to see it.

-All right, let's go.

-We made our way to the trailhead for the Point of Rocks.

This is a half-mile boardwalk trail.

It is easy and accessible.

The trail makes its way through groves of mesquite trees and other vegetation.

This trail leads to our next stop, Kings Pool.

How long have you both been with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service?

-Ambre?

-Well, I've been in my current position here at the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service only about five months now; however, I have been working here at the refuge with the species here in various capacities with different agencies for about 15 years now.

-Oh, wow.

You know a thing or two.

-A couple.

-And you?

-Yeah, it's surprising.

I've been working for Fish and Wildlife Service for 35 years now.

-35 years?

Wow!

-Yes, and worked on the refuges in Southern Nevada since 2007.

-What's your favorite part about working with the Fish and Wildlife Service?

-It's a combination of being able to do conservation work for species on the ground for national wildlife refuges, but also the people.

The incredible staff we have, I get to work with every day, our partners that help with conservation efforts on and off the refuge and throughout the rest of the state and area.

-What's your favorite thing about what you do?

-It's quite similar, actually.

Just being a part of that applied environmental conservation to help preserve these unique species and landscapes that we have here.

-Oh, look, some water.

Where does this water come from?

-Yeah.

So this is the stream outflow from the Kings Pool spring, and this is possibly a good place to see some pupfish.

-Oh, I'm gonna take a look.

I see something down there.

-Yeah, they like to hang out on the sides of the channel and swim up against the current.

You can differentiate them from invasive mosquito fish that we have in here as well by that the pupfish are deeper bodied, and they tend to be bluer.

So the males are a brilliant blue, and the females are a little more olive drab.

They hang out closer to the bottom.

You see that little guy right there?

-Yeah.

-That's a pupfish.

-Should we go see the Kings Pool?

-Yeah, let's go.

-I'd love to see the males that have that brilliant blue.

-Yes.

They're quite beautiful, and they're easy to spot.

Once you see them, you can differentiate them quite easily.

-Visitors are asked to always stay on the boardwalk.

♪♪♪ Oh, wow!

That is beautiful!

Look how clear the water is.

Is this the source of the spring right here?

-This spring here is a source of a lot of the water in this system.

You see it bubbles out of the ground at about 82-83 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's crystal clear.

-I can see the fish clearly, and I see the blue ones you were talking about, the males.

-The pupfish, yeah, the male pupfish are that beautiful, iridescent blue color.

-These fish aren't very big.

Is it difficult to do a survey to track their population?

How would you even do that?

-So it is time intensive.

We conduct surveys annually.

We call them our native fish surveys, and we work with a number of partners and agency collaborators to conduct these surveys refuge-wide.

And so what we do is, in select spring systems on a rotating basis, we deploy minnow traps into the water, and they're the perfect size for the small fish.

We monitor them, we pull them out, we count the fish, and measure them.

And we do that starting at the springhead and then all the way down the stream outflow.

That's one of the ways that we monitor our aquatic species.

The other is an annual aquatic macroinvertebrate survey that we conduct, also with our agency partners.

And it's within a few springs in the refuge that have rich diversity in these aquatic organisms.

One of the things we look for are our native naucorid, which is a type of toad bug.

And the ones in this system only exist in this system, and they're actually listed as federally threatened species.

So it gives us an idea of the community composition and the fish abundance and the ecosystem dynamics.

-I love how many unique species there are here.

And you mentioned the naucorids are federally threatened.

How's everything else looking?

How are the fish?

-The fish, the Ash Meadows amargosa pupfish, they're doing pretty well overall.

They have a lot of habitat.

A lot of the habitat that we've restored, we've restored it directed toward their conservation, which has very much helped their abundance and their populations throughout the refuge.

So that is very positive.

Additionally, we have other springsnails in the system that only occur here and nowhere else as well.

-I love to hear everything is doing pretty well.

This is a beautiful pond.

What comes next as we keep going along this boardwalk?

-So if we walk up this way, we'll come to an amphitheater, and you can see the other Point of Rocks spring system outflows as well.

-I would love to see it.

Let's head that way.

♪♪♪ Should we take a seat and relax a little bit?

-Sure.

We got a bit of shade.

It'll be nice.

-This is a nice amphitheater.

This is a beautiful view from up here.

You got a full 360-degree view of the entire valley.

I can see the mountains off in the distance, all the green and the springs in front of me here.

It's gorgeous.

-Yeah.

It's a great location to come out to the refuge.

And we're in this shaded portion in the summertime here at the amphitheater, a great place for visitors to come and relax, take in the views, and chance to see a bighorn sheep.

Also it's a great place to bring out school groups for education and interpretation, just a tremendous place to visit on the refuge.

-Kevin is right.

This is a great spot to chill out and take in the view.

But we couldn't hang out too long; I had a meetup scheduled for a super unique opportunity, and I couldn't be late.

I was lucky enough to be getting a tour of Devils Hole.

Devils Hole is a fascinating geological and ecological marvel.

This water-filled cavern is part of an extensive underground aquifer system and is home to the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish, a species found nowhere else on earth.

Water levels and temperatures are remarkably stable, creating a unique environment that has allowed the pupfish to survive in isolation for thousands of years.

Despite Devils Hole's small size, this site is a critical area for scientific research due to its unique environment and extreme adaptation of its inhabitants.

The site is heavily protected with access restricted to help conserve its delicate environment and its rare inhabitants.

Today, I'll be getting a tour of the area, and I can't wait to see it.

(Kevin Wilson) All right.

Well, welcome to Devils Hole.

-It's here at the Devils Hole I met another Kevin, this one from Death Valley National Park, and Olin, who is a fish biologist with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

Do you guys work together a lot?

-We do.

So my primary role is, I'm the Devils Hole program manager for the park, and I oversee our long-term ecosystem monitoring program, in which we come out sometimes weekly to do stuff, every other month to collect various parameters, like nutrients, what types of food sources are here for the pupfish.

So we've been doing that for over 15 years now.

So it provides us information to help us answer questions about the ecosystem and what to do if we need to do anything to help this species survive.

-Now, the Devils Hole pupfish, this is the only place in the world they live, correct?

(Olin Feuerbacher) It is.

It's considered to be the smallest geographic distribution known for any vertebrate species.

Its entire range is really no bigger than most people's two-car garage.

-And how deep is the Devils Hole?

-Sure.

So unknown.

-You've never been to the bottom?

-No.

I've been to about 130 feet on scuba, but, and I couldn't see a bottom, but divers in the early 1990s went down to 436 feet.

-436 feet?

-Yes.

It was a very long dive, but they did not see a bottom.

And they had this rope reel and lowered another 50 feet and didn't see a bottom.

But the cave structure, as you're looking here, is at an angle.

So it's not a vertical drop.

-I think that's incredible.

And do you feel a sense of pressure to look after this ecosystem because it is so small?

-Oh, absolutely, yeah.

This is one of the species that, besides it being small, it really is subject to potential catastrophe.

It's not a widespread species, obviously.

So it doesn't take a lot to really cause a major disturbance here.

And it's also really kind of a storied fish.

I used to hear about it in my undergrad biology classes.

There would be mentions of the Devils Hole pupfish.

And when we first started raising the captive population, we had 29 fish originally that started the population.

And, you know, just walking in and looking in the aquariums and seeing that you're face-to-face with these pupfish, and it kind of makes you, you know, heart skip a little beat that you're sitting there face-to-face with one of the most endangered species on the planet.

-I wanted to get into that a little bit, because it sounds to me like you have the native population, but then you have something else at a research facility?

-Right.

Right across the hill, about a mile away, is the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation facility, and that includes both laboratory, where we work with figuring out just how to keep these fish alive in captivity.

These are very difficult species to work with.

They're extremely inbred, and so a lot of the adaptability that pupfish normally have to live in a lot of environments is gone.

They do great in this one environment that would kill almost every other fish on the planet.

But when you start taking them out into captivity, they're very prone to stress.

They get diseased very easily, and so it's something that we've been working on for the last-- people from Steinhart Aquarium, Fresno State, Shark Reef Aquarium right in Vegas, have all been working with this over the past, you know, 60 years, actually.

And there's never been a fully successful attempt at keeping them alive in captivity for multiple generations.

One of the things that we really attribute our actual success to is kind of the centerpiece of our facility.

Besides the aquarium system, we have a 100,000-gallon ecosystem re-creation that simulates, to the extent possible, all of the really harsh environment conditions that are found in Devils Hole.

And that really, I think, has been one of the keys to our success in establishing that population.

-So it sounds to me like you created a replica Devils Hole and made it just as difficult to live in for all the other fish, but exactly what the pupfish want.

-Yeah.

Yeah, we keep it at basically Devils Hole happy conditions.

[laughter] It's about 1 to 2 milligrams per liter higher in dissolved oxygen.

It's about a degree and a half cooler, because we found that these conditions are right on their physiological limits.

Any hotter, they probably are going to stop reproducing and die.

Any less oxygen, there would be no oxygen.

And so since it is a completely automated system that relies a lot on mechanics rather than the natural biology out here, we want to make sure if something goes wrong, we have time to fix it.

That gives us a little bit of a buffer.

But we do try and keep it as close to Devils Hole conditions as possible, because one of the reasons for it is a lifeboat population.

If something catastrophic were to occur here, we want to be able to use that capital population to repatriate, if that's a chosen path.

And so keeping them at those really horrible conditions makes it possible for them to move back into these.

-Hey, that's up to them.

That's their thing.

That's what they want.

I think that sounds amazing.

Is it possible for me to see that?

-Absolutely.

Happy to show you around.

-From here, we headed over to the Ash Meadow Fish Conservancy facility.

First stop, the replica of the Devils Hole.

-There is a foot bath to step in on the way through.

-Why are we stepping in this foot bath if we don't plan on getting in the water?

-Well, there's a lot of invasive aquatic species that are incredibly hardy out here, as well as bacteria, viruses, all sorts of things that can potentially be transmitted.

You know, they end up in here, dust gets blown in, and we have a problem for the fish health.

So it's just a safety procedure, just to make sure that anything that we don't want in here stays out of here.

-Makes perfect sense.

And right here I see a ton of fish, but this does look a little bit different than the Devils Hole.

Can you explain a little bit about why you have this and why it looks like this?

-Yeah.

Yeah, this is-- essentially the area right here is a one-to-one mock-up of Devils Hole itself, but there are a few key differences.

This is designed to be a lifeboat population and also a research facility to learn about the pupfish.

But a few differences from Devils Hole, though, this, you'll notice there's a lot more water here.

We're keeping this actually at the historic levels, before pumping occurred in the 1950s and '60s and drew the water down.

We're keeping it at the historic levels.

So the fish, over to the shelf, have a little bit more room to swim around.

You can imagine out here in the Mojave Desert, that extra foot of water over it, that's really a great thermal blanket that they used to have that is now absent in Devils Hole.

So definitely potentially one of the reasons that the pupfish have been struggling.

-What's the difference between this side and that side over there?

-Well, this is designed to simulate as much as possible the ecosystem of Devils Hole.

And like you know, Devils Hole is largely a cave environment.

So Devils Hole, at least 500 feet deep, going 500 feet deep here was a little out of our budget, so, but we did want to replicate the cavern environment.

So beyond the shelf, it drops down to a depth of 22 feet, and it's undercut all the way to the front of the building, and it extends out into the parking lot.

So you're actually standing over most of the water right now.

-You said something there that I want to ask you more about.

You said "lifeboat population."

What does that mean?

-Well, when this first came about, there were only 35 fish left in the wild.

And it's an annual species, so the entire species dies.

-All 35 of them were going to be done after-- -Yeah.

If there wasn't successful reproduction, that could have been the last year for the Devils Hole pupfish.

In 2013 when the population was down at such critically low numbers, we had to get creative in how we were going to get fish here, because we didn't want to take fish out of the wild population and cause additional distress out there, but we couldn't figure out how to get fish into the wild population.

So we came up with a high-tech approach.

We looked at the data, which showed, during the peak of summer and the dead of winter, when conditions are the harshest, there are still some eggs being produced.

But none of those eggs are, you know, surviving to adulthood.

So they get eaten, they just die off on their own.

So we decided to try and collect some of those eggs from Devils Hole during those bad times of year.

So we designed a high-tech recovery method.

It was a piece of carpet that was glued to a piece of tile with some aquarium glue.

We put those out in Devils Hole for about three to four days, and some of the eggs that are deposited during that time get deposited on those tiles.

We retrieve them, we bring them back to the laboratory, we fan them off underwater to dislodge all the algae and invertebrates and the eggs that are attached to it, then we have a few people on microscopes just searching for these 1 millimeter perfectly clear eggs.

-Not easy to find, 1 millimeter, perfectly see through?

-Yep.

They're tiny little eggs.

We'll take them out when we find them, put them into a hatching system.

We raise them in the laboratory till they're about three months old, and we make sure that they're in good health during that time.

Once we're assured of their health, they're big enough to handle the move, we move them out to the refuge tank.

And we now do that on a monthly basis, year round.

The primary reason is Devils Hole is extremely inbred.

And originally we collected just 29-- we collected about 60 eggs.

About half of them were viable.

From those, we created 29 fish.

And those were originally stocked.

So from an already tiny population, we collected an even smaller tiny population.

So there's additional genetic bottlenecking.

We want to make sure there's a continuous genetic connection between Devils Hole and the captive population so that, not just in appearance that they look and act like Devils Hole pupfish, but at their most basic function in their their DNA will also match what's in the wild.

-I think it's incredible that just down the street from where I grew up, there's all of this scientific research happening that is so unique to-- there's nowhere else in the world that has this.

I think that's amazing.

You've been talking a lot about laboratory and experiments and research.

Is it something I'm allowed to see, can I see behind the curtain in the laboratory?

-We can.

You can meet the fish up close and personal.

-I would love to do that.

♪♪♪ Olin walked me over to the laboratory.

He showed me the Devil pupfish they are breeding and raising.

So this is the laboratory?

-This is.

This is where we do a lot of our captive propagation work and conduct a lot of our experiments to learn more about what the fish, what makes them tick.

-Olin was right.

Seeing these Devils Hole pupfish up close and personal and knowing that these were the only ones in existence anywhere in the world right here in Southern Nevada, it just makes you think and realize how what Olin and his team are doing here is incredible.

It is truly special.

They work every single day to keep a species in existence.

This lab is fascinating and amazing to see in person.

To see science at work is incredible.

Olin walked me through each of the stages of growth and how the fish are cared for.

He also showed me their food source, or as it's better known, slime.

So this is it, this is the slime factory.

-This is it.

This is where we grow the food for the baby fish.

-Well, I really appreciate the behind-the-scenes tour.

It is so amazing to see all the unique species here at Ash Meadows and everything behind the scenes that's being done to protect them.

Thank you for the tour today.

-Oh, thank you for coming out.

We love being able to tell the Devils Hole story.

-Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is truly one of the most special and unique places on the entire planet, and it's right here in our backyard in Southern Nevada.

I hope you'll take the time to come down here, meet some of my friends, and explore it for yourself.

Till next time, I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪