Tiny fish, noble falcon, survive

Press, 9 August 1976, Page 14

Tiny fish, noble falcon, survive

By

JOHN WILSON,

, staff writer

The loss of a single species of animal because of man’s indifference or negligence is a serious indictment of humanity. Strenuous efforts to save endangered species are necessary, even though the immediate prac tical results of letting a species die out might not be great. New ’ Zealand’s vigorous efforts to save birds like th Kakapo are being matched in other countries. From the United States recently came news of a victory in an ef fort to save one of the world's smallest, rarest animals from extinction.

The Devil’s Hole Pupfish is a creature an inch long. About 200 of them live in a cavern in Nevada called the Devil’s Hole. The hole is a pool about 50 feet long, 10 feet wide and almost 300 feet deep. Below the top of the cavern is a small ledge which provides a shallow patch of water, exposed to sunlight, on which flourish the algae which feed the pupfish. The ledge is the smallest habitat of any ver tebrate species in the world.

The pupfish w r as threat ened because nearby ran chers planned to pump water for irrigation. The water table would have been lowered so that the fish could no longer reach the ledge on which they feed ana spawn.

In 1952 Devil’s Hole was made a national monument by Presidential proclamation. The American Supreme Court recently ruled that, the purpose of the proclamation’s being to ensure the survival of the species, the pupfish’s right to enough water was implied by the proclamation. The ranchers nave been denied permission to draw off water. Apart from its status as an endangered species, the pupfisn is of interest to science. Devil’s Hole is in a desert area and the fish have a remarkable tolerance

of extremes of temperature and sahnity, a characteristic which is aiding research on rhe human kidney. Another conservation project <n the United States has more immediate application to projects in New Zealand. Peregrine falcons were driven to extinction in the ■ istcn United States in the last f ew decades. The widespread use of .DDT in the 1940 s and 1950 s led to the poison being assimilated by the falcons ihrougn their diet of .-raall birds and mammals. This caused the shells of the birds’ egg; to become thin and the birds crushed them while brooding. Some falcons survived. however, west of the Rockies and in anada and Alaska. The peregrine falcon has >een brec in captivity in numbers only since 1971. Now birds bred at Cornell University in New York state are being released at selected, secret sites in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland, (heir chances of survival are thought to be reasonable. Since 1970 there has been a near total ban on DDT in the United States. But another danger to the birds tomes from falconers — falconry is a sport in the United States and birds are often taken from the wild. There have been no sightngs yet of the birds in the vild, although the first were released more than a year ago. The scientists responsible for the programme estimate that it will be another two or three years before the success or failure of the programme is known. But they hope that by releasing up to 200 birds a year for the next three or four year; they may be able to restore the wild population in the eastern United States to the 200 nesting pairs that were known before the use of DDT became widespread.