Search for a living fossil - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 173

Somehow he made it, along with half the fish, which survived in spite
of being loaded in a non-temperature-controlled cargo hold. Their water
temperature had dropped from eighty-five degrees down to the for-
ties; it was amazing any made it at all. On arrival in San Francisco the
fish were whisked away in the Steinhart truck, but an exhausted John
had to conduct a press conference. Hearing about this later, I felt rather
guilty sticking John with the task of enduring it alone.
The flashlight fish were exhibited in a completely dark 1,300-gallon
tank. It was fascinating to watch them blink their lights on and o¤ as
they swam around among the rocks. Indeed, we could easily see how
e¤ective the flashing lights would be in confusing predators, since we
found tracking a single fish as it darted about quite impossible.
The two frozen coelacanths made it in perfect shape. One was pre-
served in formalin and then alcohol and put on exhibit at the Acad-
emy, and the other went to Scripps. Although we hadn't managed to
collect a live coelacanth, the expedition was still a success: it resulted
in the first exhibit in the United States of bioluminescent fishes as well
as publication of the most complete scientific papers to date on coela-
canth biology.
Yet even with these publications, the fact remained that almost noth-
ing was known about the natural history and behavior of these re-
markable living fossils. This gap in our knowledge was narrowed be-
ginning in 1987, when Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute in
Germany made a series of submersible dives at the Comoros and filmed
a number of live coelacanths he discovered living in deep submarine
caves.
Since our expedition in 1975 there has been one other serious attempt
to collect a live coelacanth. In 1989 Toba Aquarium of Japan launched
a multimillion-dollar e¤ort to capture two live coelacanths to place on
display, hoping, somewhat unrealistically, that the pair would be a male
and a female that would then breed. They used a research vessel de-
ploying a submersible ROV (remotely operated vehicle) equipped with
specially designed traps. That e¤ort also was unsuccessful.
Because of the di‹cult logistics and expense of a collecting trip and
the deepwater habitat of the coelacanth, plus recent e¤orts to list this
unique fish as an endangered species, it's an open question whether a