When Professor J. L. B. Smith of Rhodes University, South Africa, received his first description of the coelacanth fish and an urgent request to come to the East London Museum in December 1938, he believed that the amazing specimen the curator described was a fossil specimen that had somehow been preserved intact in the cold sea, not a recently living one. It could hardly be anything else, since the coelacanths had revealed no fossil record since the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.
“No, it was definitely alive when caught. It snapped at Captain Goosen’s fingers when he was touching it in the trawl net,” the young Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the first curator of the Natural History Museum in East London, assured him.
The trawler Nerine
The trawler Nerine in the late 1930s
had just brought it in as the day’s catch down at Irwin & Johnson’s Docks and Courtenay-Latimer had asked to be telephoned each time. The curator was a bit frazzled from the deadlines of trying to complete the assembly of a small dinosaur skeleton before Christmas break. She already had several fish skins from the last catch waiting to be stuffed and mounted after the dinosaur was completed. Nevertheless, she took a taxi with her assistant Enoch and together they went to the foc’s’le deck and talked to an old Scottish crewman. There on the foc’s’le, peeking out from under a pile of sponges, sharks and seaweed was a pale blue fin. Marjorie looked the fish over carefully and realized the fins were more limb like than fin like.
“I’ve never seen anything like that fish and I have been trawling for over thirty years.” The old Scotsman remarked. “It was trawled at Chalumna Coast at around 40 fathoms.” Courtenay-Latimer knew this fish was something she had to have. The driver of the taxi protested at first about having a nine stone, smelly fish in the boot of his brand new vehicle, but the curator reminded him that the fish was fresh and collecting fish from Irwin & Johnson was the reason she hired him, anyway.
East London Museum
Back at the museum, the museum chairman, Dr. Bruce-Bays, happened by when the fish lay on an examination tableand indulged Marjorie’s discovery with a quick look. “It’s only a rock cod,” he said authoritatively. Courtenay-Latimer knew that no rock cod had a strange wide tail with a tiny tail within a tail like this one had, or the plate like scales with spines, or leg-like fins. Her next step, after getting the human sized fish to the museum, was to get it to a refrigerator and there were only two in town. Both the mortuary and the cold storage refused to store the fish. From the local taxidermist Marjorie obtained what little formalin he had left and she wrapped the fish in formalin soaked sheets and newspapers. She had already written to Professor Smith with a full description and sketchesand it was weeks before he was able to reply, being on holiday hundreds of kilometers away, at his family’s getaway home in Knysna, where he felt ill and tired from an arduous teaching semester. Meanwhile Marjorie had no choice, in the heat of January, but to skin the decomposing fish and preserve and stuff the skin. In January Professor Smith wrote to Marjorie,
“It is almost certainly a Crossopterygian allied with forms that flourished in the Mesozoic or earlier, but which have been extinct for many millions of years… to honor you for having got this wonderful thing I have provisionally christened it (to myself at present)Latimeriachalumnae, and it may even be a new family.”
When he saw the specimen he was very sure now, and the newsreels projected onto movie screens around the world announced this astounding discovery.
Almost a whole century earlier, in 1833, Louis Agassiz had found the first known fossilcoelacanth in a Permian (290-240 million years ago) marl slate in Great Britain. He saw that the fin rays supporting the tail were hollow and so he named the fossil fishCoelacanthus (“hollow spine” in Greek)granulatus (after the granular appearance of its scales).The coelacanth is named for its notochord, a cartilaginous, oil filled spine. At one time during the Devonian period, the coelacanths and kin had been quite abundant and they had lived in shallow freshwater as well as marine environments. Fossils of ancient coelacanths,though not the same species as Latimeriachalumnae, have been found in South Africa. During the long ago Devonian, the Tiktaalik,a kind of freshwater coelacanth/amphibian found as fossils in Greenland, boastedinfolded enamel in its teeth, like those of the later amphibians which were its probable descendants.This creature apparently spent some time on land during drought periods. Coelacanths, then, were the ancestors of the four legged amphibians. Latimeria is a cousin of these ancestral forms.
Science has separated the bony fishes into two groups, the ray finned with single dorsal fins and paired pelvic and pectoral fins and the lobe-finned fishes, whose fins are fleshy.
The coelacanth and the African, Australian and South American lungfishes are all in the order Sarcopterygii (Greek for “fleshy fins”). The coelacanths are lobe finned fishes related to the Spotted African lungfish, which has a different but just as effective adaptation to dry seasons as Tiktaalik. The lungfish forms a layer of dried mucus around itself and hibernates in mud until wet conditions return. Of these sarcopterygians, only the coelacanth does not breathe air at some point in life, and only the coelacanth bears live young. Some of the African lungfish species can reach sizes rivalling that of the coelacanth. The Queensland, Australia lungfish is also a very ancient fish type, closely allied with species going back 100 million years. It may not look as peculiar as Latimeria, but it has its own archaic charm.
For centuries before the arrival of Europeans, African fishermen had caught coelacanths by accident as these fish of the deeper waters of 70 to 106 meters below the surface sometimes came closer to the surface at night to seek their cuttlefish meals and that is when the fishermen worked. The people called the huge blue fish “Gombessa”. Its flesh israther bad tasting, so it is a bycatch of the greater oilfish trade. Coelacanths are what is known as passive drift feeders, dining on whatever fish or cephalopods come their way. Though slow, they sometimes travel two kilometers per day. They have the curious habit of “standing” on their heads in the deep undersea caves that are their homes. The species needs complex cave shelters for cover and prey seeking. The fish reproduces slowly and has a slow metabolism. An individual may live up to 48 years. The second coelacanth catch brought to the attention of science was in December 1952 and the South African Prime Minister, Dr. D. F. Malan, was not taking any chances this time that it could decompose. He arranged for a South African Air Force plane to fly ProfessorJ. L. B. Smith to the Comoro Islands, Since the initial catch, subsequent specimens caught for science have been obtained off Sodwana Bay in South Africa, near the Comoro Islandsand near Sulawesi in Indonesia. In 1998, Professor Mark Erdman, University of California Berkeley, discovered a new Indonesian coelacanth, Latimeriamenadoensis. All are endangered, the Indonesian species critically so. Beginning in the 1980s, submersibles have located and filmed wild coelacanths off the Comoro Islands and Indonesia. None have so far survived in captivity.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) listed the coelacanth in 1989 as endangered and all unauthorized trade in coelacanths is prohibited.
This of course naturally leads to the question, “where were the coelacanths of Indonesia all this time?” And the second question is, or should be, “how do we keep these wonderful fishes from vanishing now because of human activity?”
The author does not know the answer to the first question, but to the second, safeguarding the species from siltation and sedimentation from shoreline development in South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania as well as the Comoro Islands is crucial. Another effective way to help coelacanths is encouraging more motorized shallow water fishing as opposed to the traditional “hand line” fishing and dynamite fishing that can be a threat to their populations. South Africa should be very proud of the strange looking and beautiful “last of the coelacanths”.
Deborah R. Painter
7507 Pennington Road
Norfolk, Virginia 23505-3640