Friday 19 December 2008

And You Thought Fish Were Fun 39!

well these ones are supposed to have a curse!
many years ago I purchased a book called A Fish Caught In Time, for me it was a great read, (I lent it to someone and it has not come back yet) well I guess the author is a bit short of cash and has contributed this horror story about coelacanths,
a picture taken in the 1950's of an early capture
in case you do not know they are a living fossil, believed to have died out over 65 - 70 million years ago, there are 3 known colonies of them, the problem being that they live in depths of over 100 meters and worse spend the daylight hours in caves only coming out at night to hunt, at that depth divers have to use tri-mix which can be difficult to use, a number of divers have died trying to film them hence a rerun of the story, in the article (a good read if you like this sort of thing) is that a few years age a manned sumbmersiable took some great footage of head standing coelacanths, the thought was that a small unintentional electric discharge from the sub upset the balance of the fish which is why it exhibited such strange behaviour, somehow a diver is given credit for this footage, but I am sure the footage was taken by Hans Fricke, a German scientist, who documented 109 specimens in the Commores, not mentioned in the article is that they give birth to live young, that is they do not lay eggs like most fish,

and a live one.

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