<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="64" > drunks break into the "devil's hole"</h1>
As the saying goes, "drinking is wrong", on This day on April 30, 2016, there were three drunken young people who missed the world's major events.
The three young men, after drinking, drove wildly, until they saw the place surrounded by an iron fence on the side of the road, and then they were attracted by it to stop and go to check it out.
One of them took out a gun and forcibly unlocked the locked gate, and after firing a few shots, the lock on the gate was scrapped, and the three men broke in. The three people groped inside to find fun, found a cave, and sure enough, "drinking wine to strengthen people's guts", the three people kept exploring inside, and found that there was a pool of water in the deepest part of the cave.
It may be that the environment plus alcohol makes the three people's bodies feel hot, and they do not hesitate to take off their clothes and enter the pool to start swimming. The water in the cave is not exposed to the sun, so it is very cool, and one of the people may be stimulated by the coldness of the water to the stomach, and constantly "vomit" on the shore. After finishing the frolicking, the three men drove away contentedly.
But it didn't end there, and on May 9, 2016, the Devil's Hole National Park Service offered a reward of $5,000 for clues that could be used, as long as someone provided it, and the Center for Biodiversity added a $10,000 reward to it. That is to say, as long as someone provides useful information, they can get a reward of $15,000. Tempted by such a huge sum of money, the three men had nowhere to hide and were quickly arrested by local police, who were fined $50,000 plus a year in prison.
This is because the "iron fenced place" they broke into was "Death Valley", and the cave they groped into was the "Devil's Cave", in which there was a fish protected by the world, the medaka, which was included in the "first list of species of the American Endangered Species Protection Act" in 1966, so you can see the importance of this creature. And these fish are under this protection, and their numbers are still terriblely small, according to statistics in 1979, there were only about 30 of them. And the time when these three young people broke in was just a good time for the breeding and recovery of the medaka, so the local government would punish them severely, because the actions of these three people almost destroyed the world's endangered species.
Medaka
Before we get to know the medaka, let's take a look at their habitat, the Devil's Cave
In fact, Devil's Cave is only a cave in Death Valley, Nevada, USA, but curiosity drives people to explore these small caves, and in the process a lot of incredible things happen, so these caves are called "Devil's Hole".
For example, in 1965, two diving enthusiasts wanted to explore this devil's cave, but when these two people went in, they never came back. Their friends called the police, and the exploration unit, with professional divers and professional equipment, found only the belongings of the victims here, not their people.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="96" > the grueling journey of the medaka</h1>
Devil's Cave is located in Death Valley Park, which is located in the California Desert in the United States, a place with steep terrain and extreme conditions, which is the driest region in North America.
But 2 million years ago, it wasn't actually a desert, with an inland sea and nearly 400 wetlands, but with the change of climate and the evolution of the terrain over the millennia, it gradually became a desert and an arid area. The medaka was born in this thousand years of changes, and now it has a history of 60,000 years on the earth.
In about 50,000 years ago, although Death Valley was a desert, it was not so arid, it existed in a certain lake, the desert fish is the creature here, its size, brain and behavior are very "flexible", flexible means:
This flexibility is also the reason why desert fish are still alive today, and once the habitat they inhabit has changed, their external characteristics will also change, and the medaka is one of them. As the lake dried up and the conditions became more and more harsh, ordinary desert fish could no longer survive here, which forced them to change and gradually evolved into the form of a medaka, which was more conducive to their survival. The other forms that have evolved should have been eliminated by nature.
The body length of the medaka is usually about 3 cm, feeding on the algae in the water, but because of the season, the devil's cave they live in is usually not directly hit by the sun, which leads to the extremely low oxygen content here, and the algae that need to be grown by sunlight cannot grow in large quantities, which has become one of the reasons why the number of medaka cannot increase.
In this high temperature, lack of oxygen, lack of food environment still survive the medaka is called "evolutionary miracle", but this "miracle", but also about to lose to the environment, in 2006, the relevant personnel to them counted, looking throughout the Valley of Death, the number of medaka is only 38.
And these 38 devil medaka were almost killed by three drunks, and it seemed that it was not too much to give them a more severe punishment when they thought of it.
Since then, the authorities have stepped up their management of the area, and local researchers have made many efforts to protect the medaka. They forbade nearby farmland to irrigate their farmland with groundwater, because such a move would lower the water level of the Devil's Cave where the medaka lived, which would indirectly kill the medaka.
Under a series of measures such as this, the number of medaka was finally stabilized, and it was restored to 187 in 2018, but then in 2019, there was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in California, and the aftershocks affected Death Valley, and the only remaining waters here changed again, fortunately, the number of medaka has not decreased too much, but this is not a warning given to us by nature, telling us that the crisis has not been lifted, and we still have to protect the medaka at all times, and their number is still very small.
The behavior of these three young people is a wake-up call to people all over the world, in this world there are not only the medaka, an endangered animal, China's national treasure giant panda, or the South China tiger, African elephant, red-crowned crane, etc., all of which are endangered animals.
If we don't take care of them carefully and protect them, they will one day disappear from this world and become specimens that can only be seen in museums. Although the power is small, I still want to appeal to everyone: do not lose to know how to cherish, do not let rare animals only exist on the commemorative coin.