The Coelacanth
One of my favorite fish is the old Coelacanth.
The primitive-looking fish, called the coelacanth (SEEL-uh-kanth) was thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But in 1938, a South African museum related dude found this fish in a fishing trawler and soon everyone was on fire. Biologists came together to discuss about this fish (c'on it's jus a fuckin' fish~!~) and questioned how this bizarre lobe-finned fish fits into the evolution of land animals.
You know what? we all are descendants of this creature.. T-T sad but true, we're once roaming freely in the ocean, falling prey to sharks and whales, and thus our brave ancestors made it to the land.
The coelacanths, which are related to lungfishes and tetrapods, were believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. More closely related to tetrapods than even the ray-finned fish, coelacanths were considered to be transitional species between fish and tetrapods. The first Latimeria specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa, off the Chalumna River (now Tyolomnqa) in 1938. Museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered the fish among the catch of a local angler, Captain Hendrick Goosen, on December 23, 1938. A local chemistry professor, JLB Smith, confirmed the fish's importance with a famous cable: "MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED".
The discovery of a species still living, when they were believed to have gone extinct 65 million years previously, makes the coelacanth the best-known example of a Lazarus taxon, an evolutionary line that seems to have disappeared from the fossil record only to reappear much later. Since 1938, Latimeria chalumnae have been found in the Comoros, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and in iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa.
The second extant species, L. menadoensis, was described from Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1999 by Pouyaud et al. based on a specimen discovered by Erdmann in 1998[12] and deposited at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). Only a photograph of the first specimen of this species was made at a local market by Arnaz and Mark Erdmann before it was bought by a shopper.
The coelacanth has no real commercial value, apart from being coveted by museums and private collectors. As a food fish the coelacanth is almost worthless, as its tissues exude oils that give the flesh a foul flavour. The continued survival of the coelacanth may be threatened by commercial deep-sea trawling.
Anyway..
Many scientists believe that the unique characteristics of the coelacanth represent an early step in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians.
The most striking feature of this "living fossil" is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs and move in an alternating pattern, like a trotting horse.
Coelacanths are elusive, deep-sea creatures, living in depths up to 2,300 feet (700 meters) below the surface. They can be huge, reaching 6.5 feet (2 meters) or more and weighing 198 pounds (90 kilograms). Scientists estimate they can live up to 60 years or more.
I first read about this animal when I was in middle school, and one thing that fascinates me the most is its name and its feature. Its name is super hard to pronounce for a young mind, and its feature that resembles a land animal really baffles me. What's more, the National Geographic narrator was saying "this elusive animal was once thought to have gone extinct"... and the subtitle "ikan ini pernah dijangka telah pupus oleh saintis" and I was like "WOWWW"... cuz it was discovered in the year 1938, and yet not much of us really know about this fish. Try ask any teacher in school or lecturers, bet they don't know this PREHISTORIC FISH. That's the point! PREHISTORIC!!! It is not included in our syllabus, and we were taught about dinosaurs, the dodo bird, the tasmanian tiger, mammoth, yet no one ever mention about Coelacanth~! It truly is a 'living fossil'.
This creature is considered endangered as there are only several hundreds left in the wild. We have to stop polluting the ocean if we are to stop another prehistoric creature from disappearing from the surface of the planet.
Because little is known about the coelacanth, the conservation status is difficult to characterize. According to Fricke et al. (1995), there should be some stress put on the importance of conserving this species. From 1988 to 1994, Fricke counted some 60 individuals on each dive. In 1995 that number dropped to 40. Even though this could be a result of natural population fluctuation, it also could be a result of overfishing. Coelacanths usually are caught when local fishermen are fishing for oilfish. Fishermen will sometimes snag a coelacanth instead of an oilfish because they traditionally fish at nighttime when the oilfish (and coelacanths) are feeding. Before scientists became interested in coelacanths, they were thrown back into the water if caught. Now that there is an interest in them, fishermen trade them in to scientists or other officials once they have been caught. Before the 1980s, this was a problem for coelacanth populations. In the 1980s, international aid gave fiberglass boats to the local fishermen, which resulted in fishing out of coelacanth territories into more fish-productive waters. Since then, most of the motors on the boats have broken down so the local fishermen are now back in the coelacanth territory, putting the species at risk again.
Different methods to minimize the number of coelacanths caught include moving fishers away from the shore, using different laxatives and malarial salves to reduce the quantity of oilfish needed, using coelacanth models to simulate live specimens, and increasing awareness of the need to protect the species. In 1987 the Coelacanth Conservation Council was established to help protect and encourage population growth of coelacanths.[3]
In 2002, the South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme was launched to help further the studies and conservation of the coelacanth. The South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme focuses on biodiversity conservation, evolutionary biology, capacity building, and public understanding. The South African government committed to spending R10 million on the program.
So take a moment and appreciate our ancestor.
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