July 31, 2007 — Two months ago an Indonesian fisherman caught a fish so exceptional that an international team of scientists rushed there to investigate.
French experts equipped with sonar and GPS asked the fisherman, Justinus Lahama, to reconstruct in his dugout canoe,exactly what it was he did to catch a rare coelacanth, an awkward-swimming species among the world's oldest.
"I very quickly unrolled the usual trawl line with three hooks, about 110 yards long, and at the end of three minutes, I felt a large catch," Lahama recounted.
After 30 minutes of effort under the searing tropical sun, he finally saw a fish swishing at a depth of about 65 feet.
He thought he was dreaming, he said, when he saw the creature at the end of his line.
"It was an enormous fish. It had phosphorescent green eyes and legs. If I had pulled it up during the night, I would have been afraid and I would have thrown it back in," he exclaims.
After spending 30 minutes out of water, the fish, still alive, was placed in a netted pool in front of a restaurant at the edge of the sea. It survived for 17 hours.
Coelacanths, closely related to lungfish, usually live at depths of 656-3,200 feet. They can grow up to 6.5 feet in length and weigh as much as 200 pounds.
Lahama, 48, has fished since he was 10-years-old, like his father and his grandfather before him. But he was unlikely to have ever run into this "living fossil" species, as scientists have dubbed the enigmatic fish.
Lahama's catch, weighing 110 pounds, was only the second ever captured alive in Asia. The first was caught in 1998, also off the Indonesian coastal city of Manado.
Could one Atlantic sturgeon help replenish local populations of the ancient species? Jorge Ribas gets the tale.
That catch astonished ichtyologists, who until then had been convinced that the last coelacanths were found only off eastern Africa, mainly in the Comoros archipelago. They had been thought to have died out around the time dinosaurs became extinct, until one was found there in 1938.
Their fossil records date back more than 360 million years and suggest that the fish has changed little over that period.
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