Honeymooner's fishy tale hits scales at 400m years

Honeymoon snaps are usually about sun and sand and romantic settings. Mark Erdmann's postnuptial pictures are a bit different, Instamatic shots of a dead fish in a slimy fish market.

This was not just any fish, however. It was a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish dating back 400 million years and originally thought to have gone out with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

And as a marine biologist attached to the University of California, Berkeley, he could not have been happier to show off these pictures to the folks back home.

He and his co-authors, Prof Roy Caldwell and Dr M. Kasim Moosa, write about the remarkable discovery in the science journal, Nature.

Dr Erdmann and his wife were coming to the end of their honeymoon in Bali when they decided to look for shrimp at the local fish market in Manado, explained Prof Caldwell, professor of biology at Berkeley.

His wife spotted an ugly beast 1.25 metres long on the top of a cart. Dr Erdmann recognised it immediately as a coelacanth.

Finding a specimen little changed for 250 million years and thought to have disappeared with T-rex was a big deal. Living coelacanths had already been found 60 years previously off the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean.

The Comoros fish, however, were located 10,000 kilometres from the find in Indonesia, which meant they were a wholly new and different colony, Dr Caldwell said.

The team quickly set to work looking for fishermen throughout the north Sulawesi region who had seen the fish before.

They got reports of a big but rare fish, up to two metres long and weighing up to 65kg. It was known locally as raja laut, "king of the sea".

Then last July 30th fishermen netting for deepwater shark off the young volcanic island of Manado Tua caught and delivered a raja laut to Dr Erdmann. It was near death, but he was able to film it swimming for three hours before popping it into the deep freezer for later analysis.

The hope was that many more colonies would be discovered now that the scientists knew where to look, Prof Caldwell said. The fish were probably "habitat specialists", choosing young volcanic islands with steep sides full of crevices and caves.

There are many such islands between Indonesia and the Comoros, so the coelacanths may not be quite as endangered as we thought.