Day 4: The Oldest Organisms in the World and a Species in a Bucket

Day 4 was about two famous organisms: the pupfish and the bristlecone. The former is famous because of its scarcity and the latter because of its longevity. I had not heard of either one.[1] Both were incredible.

The pupfish were the highlight of the trip for me. The Owens Valley pupfish were one of the first organisms to be listed as endangered species. They were thought to be extinct when the species was described from a preserved sample in a glass jar. Then a small population was discovered in an Owens Valley spring and they made it on the first ever endangered species list. Early efforts at conservation were difficult and culminated in an event that Edwin Philip Pister describes in his famous and powerful essay: Species in a Bucket.[2]


The story goes like this. Through an unfortunate string of events the pupfish were limited to a single pool and word got back to the managing entity that the pool had almost dried up. This led to an emergency transfer to another pond:

I netted the surviving fish into the buckets, wincing as each dead one forcefully demonstrated the fragility of life. I then relocated the cages and returned to the buckets, trusting that the battery-powered aerators had not failed during my brief absence. Although the passage of time has obscured my exact words and thoughts as I lugged two heavy buckets and their precious cargo (each weighing more than thirty pounds) over the treacherous marsh terrain, I remember mumbling something like: "Please don't let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won't have another chance!" I distinctly remember being scared to death. I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species. If I had tripped over a piece of barbed wire or stepped into a rodent burrow, the Owens pupfish would now be extinct!

But for me, the guy in charge of the project was as interesting as the project itself. He reflected several characteristics that I value professionally. I would describe him as ‘a man of action.’ He brought a wide ranging portfolio of resources to bear on his problem and has leveraged diverse social structures and technologies to help build this teetering population. He had wrestled up multiple funding sources, was supporting PhD’s work on the system but also secured free or labor from prisons and youth volunteer brigades. The work was fundamentally results driven, using a mix of ultra-high tech and ultra-low tech and everything in between. He was not afraid of technology but he was not a technology snob. The project is on the cutting edge of DNA analysis (they are doing remarkable environmental DNA) analysis[3] but he our guide told us the most effective tool he has discovered is ‘the rice knife’[4] . The project is a rare combination of insight and hard labor. And that is what impressed me. So many restoration professionals become either academic technology/math snobs or ‘bring in the bulldozers and f- the science’ pragmatists. The pupfish project was an excellent example of getting something big done by a marriage of action and reflection.


After lunch we started our ascent into the White Mountains. People started buzzing about the afternoon plan – hiking in the bristlecones. I had no idea why this was cool, but apparently, the bristlecones are the oldest organism in the world. They regularly get to be 3,000 years old and have been found as old as 5,000 years old[5], leading one student to exclaim ‘these trees are older than Jesus.’ It seems counter-intuitive that longevity would be an effective strategy for making a living in extremely harsh conditions...but there they are.


There is even a song.



Then we continued on to the Crooked Creek Station White Mountain Research Center, elevation 10,200 feet, where we would spend the final three nights. ...and lamp.

This post was written while listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel Pandora Station

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[1] It was at this point of the trip when some of the other students started playing a game of ‘trick the engineer,’ where they would describe biological processes to me and I would have to guess if they were actual or imagined.
[2] He starts his essay by describing a journal he kept for most of his professional career. The entry for the day he wrote about was remarkable: "Transplanted Cyprinodon at Fish Slough; purchased alkaline D-cells, $2.00," There is something profound here about how a life well lived in retrospect is the accumulation of many small acts…a few of which turn out to be decidedly not small…but I have not entirely penetrated it.
[3] There was also a really fantastic bit of hydraulic engineering which resulted in this very clever, multipurpose structure.

[4] Acres of cat tails were cut by hand by large crews of volunteers. Another great example of low tech problem solving is that every time invasive fish endanger the pupfish populations, our guide grabs his snorkel and spear gun and takes care of business.
[5] There is a story that I heard several times during this stop about the oldest tree ever found. Apparently a grad student was coring trees to measure their ages. He got his instrument stuck and had to cut down one tree as part of his study, so he cut this tree down to retrieve the instrument. That night, in his hotel, he started to count the rings, and as the number climbed higher and higher, his heart sunk. He had cut down the oldest tree ever found.