Devils Hole Pupfish

1 year

Nothing would be left to graze the thin film of algae and microorganisms coating the single rock shelf where the species lives: it would likely thicken within the first months, shifting the already very low dissolved oxygen level in this 34°C water.

Hypothesis

10 years

That thicker algal film would likely keep weighing on the shelf's already scarce oxygen over the following decade — a change confined to this 16 m² microhabitat, since no other known wild species depends directly on it.

Hypothesis

100 years

A century without the pupfish, the rock shelf would likely have settled into a lastingly different state: algal mats, dissolved oxygen, and microbial community reorganized around the absence of the only fish this pool has ever held.

Hypothesis

1000 years

Over a thousand years, nothing would fill that void: the Devils Hole pupfish exists nowhere else, and no other fish has colonized this isolated cavern in several millennia — unlike most extinct species, its absence would remain permanent, with no possible replacement.

Hypothesis