Gisa Nico ran the Butterfly Garden preschool for 18 years before her father had a major stroke, and her mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease progressed before she passed away. But her experience educating children has proved invaluable as she has written a book about the pupfish – a fish that lives in the desert – with her husband David.
“In our story, Adele, is a young girl on a trip with her family to Death Valley National Park in Southeastern California near the border with Nevada -an area known for its extreme temperatures and harsh conditions, and yet mostly unknown that it is teeming with a diverse range of endemic species, plants, and terrain,” reads the press release. “At Badwater Basin, whose salt-crusted floor is the result of a bygone lake which had evaporated over the course of thousands of years. At Salt Creek, Adele spots a beautiful and tiny blue and purple fish which the park’s Aquatic Ecologist tells the family is called a pupfish, an endangered fish renowned for its ability to exist with the intense heat and salt, and even adapt to a changing ecosystem over thousands of years since the Pleistocene epoch.”
The pupfish isn’t necessarily a fish that everyone has knowledge of, so Fish in the Desert is a book that may well teach adults a thing or two while, they’re reading with their kids.
“Young readers will learn how the tenacious pupfish, originally among many types of sea life, are the only ones to have survived the changing and extreme conditions of Death Valley, and how there are even subspecies of pupfish who evolved separately in different pools of water,” they say. “A back of book glossary explains terms used throughout the book, such as ecosystem, aquifer, and oasis, while an ending spread shares picture prompts inviting readers on a search to find various plants and animals in the book that make Death Valley their home.
Fish in the Desert is the first installment in the Bringing National Parks to Life series, which focuses on a different protected location within the U.S. National Park Service.”
This is the first book in the Bringing National Parks to Life series. Gisa and David Nico will be doing a book launch at the Village Wells bookstore in downtown Culver City on Saturday, December 23rd at 11 a.m.