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Relicts of a Beautiful Sea: Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert World
Along a tiny spring in a narrow canyon near Death Valley, seemingly against all odds, an Inyo Mountain slender salamander makes its home. "The desert," writes conservation biologist Christopher Norment, "is defined by the absence of water, and yet in the desert there is water enough, if you live properly." Relicts of a Beautiful Sea explores the existence of rare, unexpected, and sublime desert creatures such as the black toad and four pupfishes unique to the desert West. All are amphibians and fish, dependent upon aquatic habitats, yet living in one of the driest places on earth, where precipitation averages less than four inches per year. In this climate of extremes, beset by conflicts over water rights, each species illustrates the work of natural selection and the importance of conservation. This is also a story of persistence--for as much as ten million years--amid the changing landscape of western North America. By telling the story of these creatures, Norment illustrates the beauty of evolution and explores ethical and practical issues of what is a four-inch-long salamander worth, hidden away in the heat-blasted canyons of the Inyo Mountains, and what would the cost of its extinction be? What is any lonely and besieged species worth, and why should we care?
288 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 6, 2015
was lucky enough to find out about this book through the High Country News book reviews, even though the landscape and species are located right in my own backyard - the basin and range. This book is so many things, so give me a minute or two to discuss it's merits as there haven't been any reviews yet.
In this book Norment looks at the lives (past, present and future) of several endemic and close to extinct species; the Inyo Mountain Slender Salamander, the Owens, Salt Creek, Devil's hole, Ash Meadows, Warm Springs, and Cottonball Marsh pupfishes (I love saying the word fishes), and the Black toad. These species hold on tight to their precarious existence in an inhospitable desert environment. The biologic and geologic coverage of each of the species is extensive and at times, I'll admit, a bit overwhelming for the backyard biologist that I claim to be. However, the poetic language, existential questioning and natural world observations are so worth the time it takes to get through the technical data.
I've walked through the neighborhoods of most of these fishes and looking back with the aid of Norment's clever, detailed descriptions, I see the fish and its environment in a whole new way. I respect those tiny little fish more given their long life span and unique attributes as explained in the book. I found myself so happy to hear of the author's concerns for the Devils Hole pupfish as I've walked up to the chain link fenced area and seen the little hole that houses this tiny, protected species. Massive resources have been expended and multiple transplants have been attempted and at the end of the day we do need to ask ourselves just how far we can go and still call a species wild (read Ellen Meloy's work on desert bighorn sheep for an additional thoughtful analysis). I have no experience with the salamander or the toad, but reading about them has piqued my interest and made me hope for a future with them in it.
Most valuable to me was the discussion of the intrinsic value of native plants and animals. Historically, in the pursuit of "progress" we've (Westerners, of which I am one) concentrated on practical results - water, agriculture, jobs, etc. but we've lost beautiful things along the way. And that loss is forever. We have to each ask ourselves just how a slender salamander, in an area where you will most likely never see it, fits into our world view. The words are so thoughtful and insistent, so time sensitive and important to us all, that this book will require you to consider just how you fit into the world and how you feel about species that are of little to no economic value.
Read the book, have a conversation with the pages, with yourself and others about these issues. You'll be surprised.
In this book Norment looks at the lives (past, present and future) of several endemic and close to extinct species; the Inyo Mountain Slender Salamander, the Owens, Salt Creek, Devil's hole, Ash Meadows, Warm Springs, and Cottonball Marsh pupfishes (I love saying the word fishes), and the Black toad. These species hold on tight to their precarious existence in an inhospitable desert environment. The biologic and geologic coverage of each of the species is extensive and at times, I'll admit, a bit overwhelming for the backyard biologist that I claim to be. However, the poetic language, existential questioning and natural world observations are so worth the time it takes to get through the technical data.
I've walked through the neighborhoods of most of these fishes and looking back with the aid of Norment's clever, detailed descriptions, I see the fish and its environment in a whole new way. I respect those tiny little fish more given their long life span and unique attributes as explained in the book. I found myself so happy to hear of the author's concerns for the Devils Hole pupfish as I've walked up to the chain link fenced area and seen the little hole that houses this tiny, protected species. Massive resources have been expended and multiple transplants have been attempted and at the end of the day we do need to ask ourselves just how far we can go and still call a species wild (read Ellen Meloy's work on desert bighorn sheep for an additional thoughtful analysis). I have no experience with the salamander or the toad, but reading about them has piqued my interest and made me hope for a future with them in it.
Most valuable to me was the discussion of the intrinsic value of native plants and animals. Historically, in the pursuit of "progress" we've (Westerners, of which I am one) concentrated on practical results - water, agriculture, jobs, etc. but we've lost beautiful things along the way. And that loss is forever. We have to each ask ourselves just how a slender salamander, in an area where you will most likely never see it, fits into our world view. The words are so thoughtful and insistent, so time sensitive and important to us all, that this book will require you to consider just how you fit into the world and how you feel about species that are of little to no economic value.
Read the book, have a conversation with the pages, with yourself and others about these issues. You'll be surprised.
August 11, 2016
This was compelling writing on a subject I had never before seen treated in book format, namely the natural and human history of several species of fish and amphibian that, against all odds (natural and human) cling to life in the southwestern corner of the Great Basin desert, in southeastern California and southwestern Nevada centered largely around Owens Valley in California, Death Valley National Park (largely in California though it stretches into Nevada), and the Ash Meadows and Armargosa Valley and River area of Nevada. Each of these animals detailed in the book have tiny domains, limited to a few springs, a few pools, or in the case of the Devils Hole Pupfish, a single tiny body of water. Surrounded by lethal, blistering terrain that prevents these animals from spreading naturally, they are all uniquely vulnerable to not only climatic change but to human activity as the governments and businesses of the southwest continue to mine irreplaceable groundwater. In some cases a single pump or well too close to one of these bodies of water that these animals live in could make the species extinct.
The writing as to why the author finds these species so fascinating is well done. He wrote “there is something emotionally compelling about these islands of life, about the ways in which their inhabitants have become isolated from other of their kind…[t]hese waters pool in tinajas and cobbled creeks and wind their way through cottonwoods and willows before disappearing into sand and bedrock and huge empty basins, or before disappearing into another sort of emptiness as humans take what they believe they need and deserve.” He wrote “I admired their toughness and tenacity, the ways in which they clung to life, their ability to seek out the smallest islands of grace in oceans of adversity…” in a latter chapter adding he admired “their isolation, their vulnerability, their determined persistence in this world.”
Embedded in each chapter devoted to a particular species he is fascinated by how they have endured against all odds in such incredibly harsh environments and in situations where just having water wasn’t enough, but survival also required the ability to endure high temperatures, high salinity, occasional severe droughts, and a relative lack of food.
The author circles again and again to the topic of the value of the fish and these amphibians, a thread that weaves through the entire book. To some these animals have no value, seen as “not good for anything” as they can’t be fished or eaten or in many cases even seen by visitors, while others see them as impediments to progress, their existence (and the federal and state laws that protect them) detriments to real estate developments, mining, ranching, and most of all of drilling for and using groundwater. Though the author talks about the positive aspects of their existence – unknown ecosystem services that they might serve, a source for interesting genetic and biochemical research for organisms that are able to deal with high levels of salinity and heat – he mostly seemed to adhere to the sentiment that they are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves and didn’t welcome economic benefits being tied to their continued existence, writing that “all species have a right to exist, independent of human utilitarian concerns and needs.”
This land has already lost several organisms as detailed by the author, such as Tecopa pupfish, Vegas Valley leopard frog, Las Vegas dace, Pahrump Ranch poolfish, Raycraft Ranch poolfish, Ash Meadows poolfish, Longstreet Springsnail and Ash Meadows montane vole. All that remains of these animals are “scattered shards of memory, a few small caches of data…museum specimens that float in graves of ethanol.” Like the existing species detailed in the book they all had tiny ranges, were completely dependent upon certain water sources that mankind coveted, and were not flashy or easily noticed creatures, in many cases only noted by scientists and the occasional local (mostly as some sort of “good for nothing” tiny minnow or the like).
The animals covered in the book – many with their own chapter save four, which share a chapter, two detailed in one chapter and two in another – are fascinating. We meet the Inyo Mountains slender salamander, one of only two desert salamanders in the world, not discovered until 1973, and lives only in the central portion of the White-Inyo Range on the eastern side of Owens Valley of California, with a total habitat of only 50 acres. It is an animal where “[s]imply put, there should not be salamanders…[w]alk up a heat-soaked bajada deep into the scorched mountains and you will understand something of this anomaly.”
There is the Owns pupfish, an animal that remarkably survived the massive development of Owens Valley and the epic water fights with Los Angeles over the area’s water (the author writing that the fish “somehow had swum through the gauntlet of Los Angeles’s thirst”), an animal that has so far survived the three main horsemen of the southwestern desert’s “aquatic apocalypse…the overuse of groundwater, habitat destruction, and the havoc wrought by exotic species, primarily crayfish, largemouth bass, mosquitofish, and bullfrogs.” At one time in 1969 the entire species existed in two buckets, “carried from their dying home” by a California Department of Fish and Game biologist by the name of Phil Pister, who said “If I had tripped over a piece of barbed wire or stepped into a rodent burrow, the Owens pupfish would now be extinct.”
We meet the Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh pupfish, fish that somehow eke out a living in the depths of Death Valley itself, 200 feet below sea level, in waters that at times can be twice as salty as the ocean. Indeed Cottonball Marsh is, as the author quotes, is “the most extreme fish habitat in North America in terms of temperature and salinity,” “a glaring world of salt-crusted ground and hypersaline water” where water is two and one-half times as salty as the sea and where temperatures in the summer months can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
There is of course a chapter devoted the animal I most wanted to read about – the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) – a desert fish whose entire range on earth is not only a single pool of water, but a shallow shelf of bedrock within that pool, about 8.5 feet wide and 20 feet long. Those 170 square feet (and the eight inches of water or so above it at a minimum) are pretty much the entire range of the species, as the pupfish have little place else to live in the pool, no place to spawn, and their food sources don’t have anywhere to go either (some of which, such as the Devils Hole warm springs beetle, are also endemic to that one body of water).
Even without the threats posed by the pumping of water, the environment of Devils Hole is stressful, owning to low amounts of food, low oxygen levels, and high water temperatures (anywhere between 92 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit). As a result, uncharacteristic for other pupfish, Devils Hole pupfish are quite a bit different, as they lack the aggressiveness of other pupfish (they “intensively court females but never defend territories”) and exhibit a distinctive retention of juvenile traits, such as “small size, relatively large head and eyes, lack of pelvic fins, and extremely long anal fin,” a trait known as padeomorphosis and is often found for instance in amphibians living in areas with “short growing seasons and low nutrient levels.”
However, as the author details the many failed efforts to propagate Devils Hole pupfish in other locales, many of the things that make a Devils Hole pupfish might be tightly tied to that specific environment. To the enormous frustration of conservationists (and to considerable debate among researchers) many of these aforementioned traits vanish within a couple of generations when Devils Hole pupfish are placed in a new environment. The author got into fascinating discussions of phenotypic plasticity (a natural trait perhaps of pupfish in response to highly variable desert environments) and genetic load (essentially the fish might suffer from generally poor genetic health and variability of the entire population).
The remaining fish covered in the book are the Ash Meadows pupfish and the Warm Springs Amargosa Pupfish, both of which survive in Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge along with other endemics such as the Ash Meadows speckled dace, Ash Meadows pebblesnail, and the Ash Meadows blazing star. The story of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge was compelling. Though only a 24,000-acre park (“an area that would easily fit in a rectangle six miles by nine miles on a side”), it is home to 29 endemic organisms (and once home to three more, now extinct), a higher density than any national wildlife refuge in the country. Despite its critical importance in preserving these unique animals, the refuge almost didn’t happen as Norment detailed political, business, and government interests that at every turn opposed the refuge and still in many ways threaten its existence.
The final animal (with a somewhat shorter chapter when compared with the others) was the Black Toad (Bufo exsul), which is found only in four springs in Deep Springs Valley, perhaps in forty or fifty acres of territory total for the species, with one of the most (if not the most) restricted ranges and fewest living members of any species of frog or toad in the world.
It was an enjoyable book, I had very few complaints. One or two chapters went on maybe a bit longer than I would have liked, or at least the rhythm of the writing lead me to feel they were a tiny bit overlong. Some of the weaving of the author’s philosophy and literary tastes didn’t always completely gel with the writing. Overall though the book was an enjoyable and fascinating read, focusing not only on the star organisms but the natural history of the area and the human saga around them. There were interviews detailed in the book with the author skillfully showing the personality of those he interviewed and it was clear Norment strived to understand pro-development forces in the story of saving these species and their tiny worlds. It was very nice balance.
The writing as to why the author finds these species so fascinating is well done. He wrote “there is something emotionally compelling about these islands of life, about the ways in which their inhabitants have become isolated from other of their kind…[t]hese waters pool in tinajas and cobbled creeks and wind their way through cottonwoods and willows before disappearing into sand and bedrock and huge empty basins, or before disappearing into another sort of emptiness as humans take what they believe they need and deserve.” He wrote “I admired their toughness and tenacity, the ways in which they clung to life, their ability to seek out the smallest islands of grace in oceans of adversity…” in a latter chapter adding he admired “their isolation, their vulnerability, their determined persistence in this world.”
Embedded in each chapter devoted to a particular species he is fascinated by how they have endured against all odds in such incredibly harsh environments and in situations where just having water wasn’t enough, but survival also required the ability to endure high temperatures, high salinity, occasional severe droughts, and a relative lack of food.
The author circles again and again to the topic of the value of the fish and these amphibians, a thread that weaves through the entire book. To some these animals have no value, seen as “not good for anything” as they can’t be fished or eaten or in many cases even seen by visitors, while others see them as impediments to progress, their existence (and the federal and state laws that protect them) detriments to real estate developments, mining, ranching, and most of all of drilling for and using groundwater. Though the author talks about the positive aspects of their existence – unknown ecosystem services that they might serve, a source for interesting genetic and biochemical research for organisms that are able to deal with high levels of salinity and heat – he mostly seemed to adhere to the sentiment that they are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves and didn’t welcome economic benefits being tied to their continued existence, writing that “all species have a right to exist, independent of human utilitarian concerns and needs.”
This land has already lost several organisms as detailed by the author, such as Tecopa pupfish, Vegas Valley leopard frog, Las Vegas dace, Pahrump Ranch poolfish, Raycraft Ranch poolfish, Ash Meadows poolfish, Longstreet Springsnail and Ash Meadows montane vole. All that remains of these animals are “scattered shards of memory, a few small caches of data…museum specimens that float in graves of ethanol.” Like the existing species detailed in the book they all had tiny ranges, were completely dependent upon certain water sources that mankind coveted, and were not flashy or easily noticed creatures, in many cases only noted by scientists and the occasional local (mostly as some sort of “good for nothing” tiny minnow or the like).
The animals covered in the book – many with their own chapter save four, which share a chapter, two detailed in one chapter and two in another – are fascinating. We meet the Inyo Mountains slender salamander, one of only two desert salamanders in the world, not discovered until 1973, and lives only in the central portion of the White-Inyo Range on the eastern side of Owens Valley of California, with a total habitat of only 50 acres. It is an animal where “[s]imply put, there should not be salamanders…[w]alk up a heat-soaked bajada deep into the scorched mountains and you will understand something of this anomaly.”
There is the Owns pupfish, an animal that remarkably survived the massive development of Owens Valley and the epic water fights with Los Angeles over the area’s water (the author writing that the fish “somehow had swum through the gauntlet of Los Angeles’s thirst”), an animal that has so far survived the three main horsemen of the southwestern desert’s “aquatic apocalypse…the overuse of groundwater, habitat destruction, and the havoc wrought by exotic species, primarily crayfish, largemouth bass, mosquitofish, and bullfrogs.” At one time in 1969 the entire species existed in two buckets, “carried from their dying home” by a California Department of Fish and Game biologist by the name of Phil Pister, who said “If I had tripped over a piece of barbed wire or stepped into a rodent burrow, the Owens pupfish would now be extinct.”
We meet the Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh pupfish, fish that somehow eke out a living in the depths of Death Valley itself, 200 feet below sea level, in waters that at times can be twice as salty as the ocean. Indeed Cottonball Marsh is, as the author quotes, is “the most extreme fish habitat in North America in terms of temperature and salinity,” “a glaring world of salt-crusted ground and hypersaline water” where water is two and one-half times as salty as the sea and where temperatures in the summer months can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
There is of course a chapter devoted the animal I most wanted to read about – the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) – a desert fish whose entire range on earth is not only a single pool of water, but a shallow shelf of bedrock within that pool, about 8.5 feet wide and 20 feet long. Those 170 square feet (and the eight inches of water or so above it at a minimum) are pretty much the entire range of the species, as the pupfish have little place else to live in the pool, no place to spawn, and their food sources don’t have anywhere to go either (some of which, such as the Devils Hole warm springs beetle, are also endemic to that one body of water).
Even without the threats posed by the pumping of water, the environment of Devils Hole is stressful, owning to low amounts of food, low oxygen levels, and high water temperatures (anywhere between 92 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit). As a result, uncharacteristic for other pupfish, Devils Hole pupfish are quite a bit different, as they lack the aggressiveness of other pupfish (they “intensively court females but never defend territories”) and exhibit a distinctive retention of juvenile traits, such as “small size, relatively large head and eyes, lack of pelvic fins, and extremely long anal fin,” a trait known as padeomorphosis and is often found for instance in amphibians living in areas with “short growing seasons and low nutrient levels.”
However, as the author details the many failed efforts to propagate Devils Hole pupfish in other locales, many of the things that make a Devils Hole pupfish might be tightly tied to that specific environment. To the enormous frustration of conservationists (and to considerable debate among researchers) many of these aforementioned traits vanish within a couple of generations when Devils Hole pupfish are placed in a new environment. The author got into fascinating discussions of phenotypic plasticity (a natural trait perhaps of pupfish in response to highly variable desert environments) and genetic load (essentially the fish might suffer from generally poor genetic health and variability of the entire population).
The remaining fish covered in the book are the Ash Meadows pupfish and the Warm Springs Amargosa Pupfish, both of which survive in Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge along with other endemics such as the Ash Meadows speckled dace, Ash Meadows pebblesnail, and the Ash Meadows blazing star. The story of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge was compelling. Though only a 24,000-acre park (“an area that would easily fit in a rectangle six miles by nine miles on a side”), it is home to 29 endemic organisms (and once home to three more, now extinct), a higher density than any national wildlife refuge in the country. Despite its critical importance in preserving these unique animals, the refuge almost didn’t happen as Norment detailed political, business, and government interests that at every turn opposed the refuge and still in many ways threaten its existence.
The final animal (with a somewhat shorter chapter when compared with the others) was the Black Toad (Bufo exsul), which is found only in four springs in Deep Springs Valley, perhaps in forty or fifty acres of territory total for the species, with one of the most (if not the most) restricted ranges and fewest living members of any species of frog or toad in the world.
It was an enjoyable book, I had very few complaints. One or two chapters went on maybe a bit longer than I would have liked, or at least the rhythm of the writing lead me to feel they were a tiny bit overlong. Some of the weaving of the author’s philosophy and literary tastes didn’t always completely gel with the writing. Overall though the book was an enjoyable and fascinating read, focusing not only on the star organisms but the natural history of the area and the human saga around them. There were interviews detailed in the book with the author skillfully showing the personality of those he interviewed and it was clear Norment strived to understand pro-development forces in the story of saving these species and their tiny worlds. It was very nice balance.
February 18, 2021
Christopher Norment says that his book is "woven out of science, poetry, aesthetics, and personal experience." That seems like a good description of this beautiful book about pupfish, toads, and salamanders who manage to make a living in the most unforgiving habitats. Which leads to discussions about the absolutely crucial aquifers under the Mojave Desert and surroundings, and how people grab that water for a quick buck, and how we do or don't place value on these obscure lives tucked away in springs and sinkholes.
June 2, 2020
Great book but a bit too lyrical for me. I’m familiar with some of these places and know a couple of the “characters”. I’m glad they are written about so well
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews