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Hidden inside a deep pool in a limestone cavern in America’s hottest and driest national park, one of the world’s rarest fish is making a comeback from near extinction.

Up until a mysterious decline in the 1990s, biologists counted between 300 to 500 Devils Hole pupfish each spring. The tiny iridescent blue and olive-green fish survive off algae on a shallow shelf above a deep 92-degree geothermal pool in Devils Hole, an outcrop of Death Valley National Park in southwest Nevada.

Their population had dropped to just 20 in March 2025. In the months prior, their habitat was disrupted by two earthquakes, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which caused six-foot waves inside the cavern, like “water in a washing machine,” pushing algae and fish eggs off their shelf into the pool, an abyss so deep no one has found the bottom. (Divers have reached 436 feet with no sign of it.)

Conservation efforts, including transferring fish bred in captivity, brought their population to 77 by this spring. And now, the National Park Service says the fish population has nearly doubled to 137.

“While challenges remain,” Death Valley National Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds says in a statement, “we’re encouraged by this progress and committed to its long-term survival.”

The pupfish came to Devils Hole through a connection to the Colorado River during a wetter climactic period 2 million years ago. As the region became more arid over the last 10,000 to 20,000 years, the hole was cut off from other water sources and fish populations. The Devils Hole pupfish adapted to their unique low nutrient conditions and became one of the most inbred animals known to science.

Today, the cavern is surrounded by locked fences and is under video surveillance to protect the fish from beer-drinking vandals and other threats.