Exotic Animals

I found this story the other day, while I was looking through some back news
articles, and it struck my fancy…  It’s about a fisherman in Indonesia, and
the unusual fish he caught…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070521/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_indonesia_fish

He caught what may be the world’s rarest fish: the ceolacanth.  This fish is
only known to live in deep waters of the Indian Ocean, near the Comoro Islands,
or in deep waters of the Indonesian archipelago.  It is a unique animal in many
respects.

First, and most famously, it was thought to be exctinct since the time of the
dinosaurs.  In 1938, however, one was caught of the southeastern coast of
Africa, and when it was identified, by the South African ichthyologist Marjorie
Courtenay-Latimer, the hunt began to find it’s natural habitat.  This was later
discovered hundreds of miles north of the original find, around the Comoro
Islands.  Later, in the 1980’s, another population of ceolacanths was discovered
in Indonesia.

The fish is also famous, though, for its position on the evolutionary tree. 
The ceolacanth is that most rare of beasts: a true missing link.  In this case,
it’s a link between early fish, and early terrestrial animals.

The ceolacanth has very unusual fins.  Instead of a fin supported by numerous
rays, a ceolacanth’s fins are supported as a fring around a stout, limb-like
appendage.  The fish has four of these appendages, two pectoral and two pelvic. 
The analogy to fore- and hind-limbs is obvious, and scientists believe that all
modern land dwelling animals arose from a fish in the ceolacanth family.

This is an exciting find; as the article notes, ceolacanths cannot live in
surface waters; the temperatures, pressures, and light levels are all wrong for
them.  Their natural habitat is at least 60 meters (almost 200 feet) below the
waves, and they have never been successfully kept in captivity.  In their own
habitat, ceolacanths are dangerous predators; at the surface, they prove to be
surprisingly fragile.  This could explain how these fish stayed hidden from
human eyes for so long.

And that’s all I have to say about this.  Animals don’t get much more exotic
than the ceolacanth.

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