Survival of the fishiest

POOR fish! It has been dredged from its hidden volcanic refuge, and then been skinned, stuffed, and exhibited the world over. It has had its brain and eyes and ears minutely dissected, its fins anatomised, and its huge, ridged scales scanned under the electron microscope. Then it has had its DNA sequenced, not to mention its mitochondrial RNA, and its body biochemicals minutely analysed. It has had its eggs ripped from its body - and they are as large as grapefruits, the biggest of any fish. It has been sought with the intensity of Inca gold. It has brought about the severance of friendships, and almost caused an international incident. It is, of course, Latimeria chalumnae, the coelacanth, the famous "living fossil" that swam into human awareness in 1938, having quietly survived from the age of Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus.

Latimeria is named after a curator of the East London Museum, in South Africa, Margaret Courtenay-Latimer, who was intelligent enough to recognise that the beautiful blue fish that Captain Hendrik Goosen had caught was something truly out of the ordinary. The fish was almost lost to science because there were insufficient preserving agents in a small African town to pickle a five-foot long, 127lb specimen, particularly three days before Christmas. That a good, stuffed specimen survived was itself something of a miracle.

The coelacanth caused an instant sensation. Latimeria was made known to the world by an obsessive ichthyologist, JLB Smith, "who devoted much of his life to tracking down living examples. He ran a poster campaign up and down the East African coast, promising a king's ransom (at least for a poor fisherman) for a living coelacanth. It was not until 1952 when one finally turned up in the Comoro Islands, once again at Christmas. Thanks to JLB's persistence, the President of South Africa himself autho-rised a Dakota to whisk the fish away to a Cape Town museum, much to the subsequent chagrin of the French, who governed the islands.

Galled, they then set about capturing Latimerias of their own.

Part of the emotional pull of the coelacanth results from its role as an ancestor: it was the "fish with legs" considered to lie at the root of the evolution of all land vertebrates - and hence, ultimately, ourselves. JLB Smith himself described it as "Old Fourlegs". The "legs" in question are fleshy, lobed fins that seem almost in transit towards limbs. It was the fish that fishiest cast light on our earliest history; it was supposed to be to the palaeontologist what the Rosetta Stone was to the archaeologist. Such anthropocentric optimism turned out to be over-egged.

"Old Fourlegs" threw up more problems than solutions, and is now reckoned to be a second cousin once removed rather than a direct ancestor of the earliest land animals. No matter, it is still a remarkable survivor.

Its toughness is being tested further. Hans Fricke is the German poacher-turned-gamekeeper who took the first famous film of Latimeria at home. In life, it performs bizarre balletic tumbles, which are still not fully explained. He realised how few living individuals there were; they proved to be live-bearers, producing perfect miniatures of the parent - their babies are called "pups". But Latimeria grows slowly, and pups rarely.

Conservation is a worry, what with a price on the head of every fish.

Fricke supported their protection, leading eventually to a physical confrontation with Japanese bounty hunters. It is curious how such an atavistic oddity could inspire so much devotion, but Weinberg's lively account of politics and serendipity in marine research helps you understand how even a fish could engender fanaticism.

In the last year or two, Latimeria has been caught in Indonesia, so it may be more widespread than anyone had imagined. Most mysterious of all are two small and exquisite silver models that were bought in Bilbao in 1964. They undoubtedly represent coelacanths to the life. Spanish scholars pronounce the workmanship Meso American, possibly as old as 18th century. Can it be that this piscine Methuselah still hides in some out-of-the-way spot in the New World? To endure in this world, it seems, it pays to be elusive.

And to taste disgusting.

Copyright 1999
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