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Coelacanth - living fossil of St Lucia Wetlands |
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Tuesday, 17 July 2007 13:54 |
The Greater St Lucia Wetland Park (GSLWP) added a living fossil to its record of marine species with the recent discovery on 28 October 2000, of three living coelacanths in a submarine canyon of the coast near Sodwana Bay.A group of divers, led by Pieter Venter – Pieter Smith, Etienne le Roux, Peter Timm of Triton Dive Charters, Dennis Harding, Erna Smith, Gilbert Gunn, Christo Serfontein and Martin Bensch, discovered and photographed the coelacanths, during a mixed-gas deep dive to 104 meters off the coast. They were positively identified by Dr Phil Heemstra of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown.
"I saw this eye reflecting towards me and that made me curious," Venter said later. "I approached…and underneath an overhang, I saw a fish of about two meters long." After several seconds he realized it was a coelacanth. "I did not expect anything like this. I was not trying to find it." He signaled Timm and they saw two more. They had no cameras. "It was like seeing a UFO without taking a photograph." Timm took some convincing to realize what they had seen. The group decided they would return with cameras. This would be the shallowest confirmed sighting of coelacanths.
The coelacanth is a fish thought to be extinct until a live specimen was caught in a trawler net in 1938 off the Chalumna River Mouth of the Eastern Cape. This specimen was identified by Miss Margery Courtenay-Latimer, Curator of the East London Museum and named Latimeria chalumnae by the late Professor JLB Smith of Rhodes University. The specimens found off the GSLWP appear to be of the Latimeria species.Further specimens were later found off the Comoros Islands in 1952 and, more recently Indonesia and Madagascar.In his book “Old Fourlegs”, written in 1957 and describing graphically the saga of the discovery of the Chalumna and Comoros coelacanths, Prof Smith argued for the presence of coelacanths along the eastern African coast, saying that the Chalumna specimen was possibly a stray from that area and that it was likely that it represented a population of the fish resident in a deep, rocky marine environment.This exciting discovery off Sodwana Bay is all the more important because it confirmed, for the first time, a South African presence of this extremely rare fish in a formally protected area that was declared a World Heritage Site in December 1999.
Additional coelacanths were filmed and a couple were found to be matches from the previous dives. In March-April 2002, the Jago Submersible and Fricke Dive Team descended into the depths off Sodwana and observed 15 coelacanths, one pregnant. Again some were repeats indicating likely residency.
The national Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism, published an emergency regulation governing the protection of the coelacanths in the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park.In terms of this regulation any disturbance to, or attempts to catch, locate and/or film these rare fish is forbidden and may only be made under a permit issued by the Minister.“We are extremely excited by the discovery of coelacanths in the marine section of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park”, said Dr George Hughes, Chief Executive Officer of KZN Wildlife.“These coelacanths are the only ones in the world to occur in a formally protected area, and KZN Wildlife, in co-operation with the national Department of Environment Affairs and Tourism, intend to ensure that our coelacanths enjoy the maximum protection possible”, he said.“I would also like to pay tribute to the tenacity of the group of divers who discovered these fish at extreme depths. I would also like to express our sympathy to them for the death of Dennis Harding, who lost his life during a dive on 27 November 2002”, said Dr Hughes.“The discovery of coelacanths adds enormously to the attraction and fascination of the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park, but also brings with it the need to improve the policing of this internationally recognized protected area in order to protect this extremely valuable species”, said Dr Hughes.
EXCERPTS TAKING FROM "DINOFISH.COM"
For further reading on the internet, we found a couple of interesting websites:
- www.dinofish.com
- www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth
- www.coelacanth-diver.co.za/
- www.extinctanimal.com/the_coelacanth.htm
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