KVIG Informative

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a shallow limestone shelf inside a Nevada cave deserved federal water protection because a fish found nowhere else on Earth needs it to spawn. Two earthquakes swept that same shelf clean in 2024 and 2025, and the population the court’s ruling was designed to protect crashed to a fraction of its size before three wildlife agencies intervened.

Devils Hole is a water-filled cavern inside a detached, 40-acre tract in Nye County, near the California line. President Harry Truman added the tract to Death Valley National Monument on Jan. 17, 1952, through Presidential Proclamation No. 2961, citing the site’s scientific significance and ordering it specially protected, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 opinion in Cappaert v. United States. The monument became Death Valley National Park in 1994 under the California Desert Protection Act, and Devils Hole remains a disjunct unit of the park today, according to the National Park Service. The cavern is the only natural habitat of the Devils Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, a species that evolved in isolation after an ancient lake system dried up, the Supreme Court’s opinion states.

Francis and Dorothy Cappaert operated a 12,000-acre ranch about 2.5 miles from Devils Hole, irrigating roughly 4,000 acres and running as many as 1,800 cattle, according to the Supreme Court’s opinion. The ranch began pumping groundwater in 1968, and the water level inside Devils Hole fell steadily afterward, dropping to 3.93 feet below a fixed monitoring marker by 1972, the opinion states. Federal biologists determined that a level no lower than 3 feet below the marker was needed to preserve the submerged rock shelf where the pupfish spawn and feed on algae, according to the same source.

The United States sued to limit the ranch’s pumping, and a federal district court issued a permanent injunction holding the water level at or above the 3-foot threshold, the Supreme Court opinion states. The Cappaerts and the Nevada state engineer appealed, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on June 7, 1976, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, that the 1952 proclamation had implicitly reserved enough water, including groundwater, to preserve Devils Hole’s scientific value regardless of Nevada water law, according to the opinion.

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Devils Hole remains fenced and closed to public entry today, viewable only from an overlook platform, according to the National Park Service. The Devils Hole pupfish is listed as an endangered species, and biologists with the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nevada Department of Wildlife conduct twice-yearly dive counts of the population, the Park Service states.

Earthquakes in December 2024 and February 2025 sent waves through the cavern that swept algae, organic material and fish eggs off the shallow shelf the 1976 ruling was designed to protect, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The population had reached a 25-year high of 191 fish in the spring 2024 count; the National Park Service recorded only 38 fish in the spring 2025 count that followed the earthquakes.

The three agencies responded by transferring 19 captive-raised, Devils Hole-derived pupfish from the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility into the wild population, the first such transfer in the program’s history, while also supplementing the fish’s food supply as the shelf’s algae regrew, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The population reached 77 fish by the spring 2026 count, the same source states.

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The water right the Supreme Court recognized in 1976 protects Devils Hole’s shelf from a rancher’s well. It does nothing to stop an earthquake, and the fish’s recovery since early 2025 has depended less on that 50-year-old ruling than on a hatchery down the road and biologists willing to hand-feed a population that can still be counted in the dozens.