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Dinosaur fish pushed to the brink

Inigo Gilmore

The Coelacanth has survived for millions of years. Will fishing kill it?

Kigombe: In this Tanzanian village on the edge of the Indian Ocean, a fisherman stood before a large plastic container. He reached inside and hauled out a monster of a fish, slapping its 60 kg on a table.This is a living fossil, once thought extinct: a coelacanth.

It is not every day that you come face to face with a dinosaur dating back 400 million years, but for these fishermen it has become routine. But now it seems that man may have discovered the fish just to eradicate it, as ever-deeper trawling throws up fears for the dwindling populations of the fish, which lives at depths of between 100 m and 300 m.

The appearance of these creatures off the Tanzanian coast is a dramatic and as yet unfinished chapter in the extraordinary story of the coelacanth, an ancient fish that was `rediscovered'. The coelacanth evolved 400 million years ago — by contrast Homo sapiens has been around for less than 200,000 — and was believed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs until one was caught off South Africa in 1938.

The fish has a remarkable physiology - it has no backbone, but an oil-filled `notochord' and four limb-like appendages, with stubby fins. It has a double tail and gives birth to as many as 26 young at one time. It is believed to gestate for 14 months and may live for more than 80 years. The world waited another 14 years before the second coelacanth was `discovered' in the Comoros, off the East African coast. Then several more were found.

It was in August 2004 that the local fisheries authority received a phone call saying fishermen in Kigombe had caught a `strange' fish. Officials went to check and found two specimens of Latimira chalumnae — the coelacanth. Over the next five months 19 more were netted, weighing between 25 kg and 80 kg. The numbers are perplexing officials of the Tanga Coastal Zone Conservation and Development Programme, which has a long-term strategy to protect the species, with the help of Irish aid. They see a connection with trawling — especially by big Japanese vessels — near the coelacanth's habitat, as within days of trawlers casting their nets coelacanths have turned up in shallow water.

A programme coordinator said: "Once we do not have trawlers, we don't get the coelacanths, it's as simple as that." His colleague said they had been pressuring the Tanzanian Government to limit trawler activity.

He added: "I suppose we should be grateful to these trawlers, because they have revealed this amazing and unique fish population. but we are concerned they could destroy these precious things.."

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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