Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin (ISSN 0178 – 6288) . Number 15, July 1987, pp. 1-8. | Page 2

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so it was a gutted specimen that he eventually saw. In spite of this, and the fact
that it was so large, he recognised it immediately as a coelacanth. He named it
Latimeria and informed an astonished world that a creature thought to have been
extinct for 70 million years was still alive."
David Attenborough (1979) added: "The discovery was hailed as the scientific
sensation of the century and a huge search for another specimen was mounted.
Leaflets and posters carrying a picture of Latimeria and offering a huge reward
were distributed among the countless fishing villages that dot the coasts of
southern and eastern Africa. But without result. Then, fourteen years later, after
it had seemed that this strange fish had appeared only to disappear totally,
another was caught, not off South Africa but a thousand miles away in Anjouan,
one of the tiny Comoro Islands that lie in the Indian Ocean midway between
Madagascar and the coast of Tanzania. The first one, it seems, was a stray, for the
fishermen of the Comoros said that the coelacanth was no stranger to them. They
caught one or two each season in depths of about two or three hundred metres.
They did not often fish for them deliberately, for a coelacanth fights hard when it
is hooked and a man might have to struggle with one of them for many hours
before it could be hauled on board his canoe. And after all that trouble, its flesh is
oily and not particularly good to eat. Indeed, almost the most valuable part of the
coelacanth anatomy, to the Comorians, is its rough heavy scales. They are very
useful for rubbing down inner tubes when mending a puncture.”
Attenborough (1979) continues: “Since that time, several dozen more coelacanths
have been caught and paradoxically, science now knows more about Latimeria
than many an abundant fish. A pregnant female has been caught with young
inside her attached to their yolk sacs, just like the Illinois fossil, showing that the
species does not lay its eggs but gives birth to live young. But because it is so
powerful a fish, such a doughty fighter and has to be dragged up from such
depths, Latimeria very seldom reaches the shore alive."
Attenborough (1979) added: “One of the fishermen brought a Coelacanth in,
lashed to the side of his canoe. It, too, was nearly dead, but he was persuaded to
release it in a bay long enough for it to be filmed with an underwater camera as it
swam slowly above the bottom. And indeed, it did hold its stout pectoral fins
away from the sides of its body, and it was not hard to imagine that had it been
vigorous, it could have used them to help it move over the rocky sea floor of its
true environment. What is more, it was also clear that, mechanically, such fins
would be of real assistance out of water as in it, had the fish, like its ancient
forebears, been living in shallow water and become stranded.”
John E. McCosker (1979) in his paper "Inferred Natural History of the Living
Coelacanth" writes: "An hypothetical life history of Latimeria chalumnae can be
constructed on the basis of its anatomy, diet, catch records, and Comoran
oceanographic and meteor ological data. On that basis, it appears that Latimeria
behaves like a large, reef-associated piscivorous grouper.”
Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin – Number 15 – July 1987