In 1969, California biologist Phil Pister carried endangered Owens pupfish across hazardous terrain in two buckets; in 2024, a seventh refuge population was established

Imagine that it is a sweltering summer night in 1969, in the high desert of eastern California, where 40-year-old Phil Pister, a government biologist, is running through rugged marshland with two buckets in hand, weighing 30 pounds each. He is tripping over rodent burrows and dodging barbed wires in the pitch-black darkness.

And those buckets contained the world's only surviving members of a vertebrate species called Owens pupfish. As per the obituary of Pister published in UC Santa Barbara Magazine, the final pool containing those fish was rapidly drying up, and Pister was allotted less than an hour to save the fish before extinction. No rescue squad. No financial backing for a mission. Just Pister carrying his two buckets through rugged terrain. It sounds unreal indeed, but it happened, and it remains one of the most bizarre and undertold tales of survival in American conservation history.

The fish nobody asked for


Not everyone would recognize the Owens pupfish (Cyprinodon radiosus) as something remarkable. It is a two-inch-long, silver colored minnow-like creature, which very few ever have had the chance to see, and even fewer would bother if they did. It makes its habitat in small desert springs in Owens Valley, California. This pupfish population dates back to the Pleistocene era and has been separated from the other pupfish species when the ancient lakes providing habitats to these fish dried up. By the 1940s, it had almost become extinct as a result of the water diversion by Los Angeles for years and the introduction of predatory sport fish, which eat the pupfish.

It reappeared again in 1956 in only a few small pools but continued to decrease. It is in this environment where Pister had to operate when he received the call that the last pool of Owens pupfish was on the verge of collapse. As mentioned in Robert Rush Miller and Edwin P. Pister’s own scientific article titled “Management of the Owens Pupfish, Cyprinodon radiosus, in Mono County, California,” published in the journal Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, the oxygen in the pond had become dangerously low due to extreme temperatures, and the fish were already struggling in shallow waters when Pister arrived. Together with his co-worker, he had been moving the fish to aerated cages. It became anything but routine once he understood how little time he had left.

Why this is more than just a nice old story

And that is where most of these tales end: a valiant scientist, a thrilling rescue operation, and a feel-good ending. However, the more intriguing and, frankly speaking, typically American element of this tale is what transpired afterwards. In 1969, America did not yet have the Endangered Species Act, which would occur in 1973, four years down the road. However, the Owens pupfish were already federally listed as endangered in 1967, under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966.

After Pister saved the desert pupfish, he continued his work by becoming co-founder of the Desert Fishes Council. He was also involved in the lower court hearings and advocacy that led to the landmark 1976 Supreme Court case: Cappaert v. United States, about protecting another cousin species of pupfish, the Devils Hole pupfish. This historic moment shows how far one individual would go to protect a two-inch fish which nobody ate and which nobody was being profited from.

Seven populations, and a genuinely fragile win

However, the species has not received a clean bill of health. A 2013 genetics study published in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society revealed that decades of translocations between refuge ponds have resulted in genuine risks of inbreeding and alarmingly low effective population sizes, with some cases being in the low dozens.

The latest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report in April 2024, established a seventh population on tribal land in the Owens Valley, under a formal Safe Harbor Agreement. It certainly is a landmark, but the mathematics remain the same: this is a species that survives completely dependent on a few small desert pools, and the fact that it may take only one bad summer for everything to repeat itself again.

So, this is not an example of a nice and clean conservation success story that we may be able to brag about. This is rather about a species living on the brink of extinction that was once saved by a man with just two buckets and has been preserved ever since, thanks to the unnoticed work in the field that is not glamorous and does not attract any funding whatsoever.