- Hello and welcome to
the Church of the Giant
Floating Question Mark.
(lively, playful beat)
Not unlike the supervisor
at your last job,
the coelacanth is an
order of bottom-dwelling
carnivorous ocean fish that grow
up to 6 1/2 feet long and
weigh up to 200 pounds.
But they're not just huge and crazy ugly;
they're also one of the
most interesting animals
in all of biology.
People used to think
coelacanths were extinct.
Imagine if tomorrow scientists discovered
that a small herd of adorable triceratops
were still alive, living somewhere
in the rain forests of South America.
Well, trade that genus of dinosaur
for an order of lobe-finned fish,
and that's pretty much what
happened with the coelacanth.
Up until the 1930s, scientists only knew
about the coelacanth
from the fossil record.
Everyone thought these
fish had been extinct
for about 65 million years.
But, in December, 1938, a
South African museum curator,
named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer,
got a call from a fishing fleet manager
asking if she wanted to
take a look at a selection
of fish caught near the
mouth of the Chalumna River
off the coast of South Africa.
When Courtenay-Latimer examined the haul,
she found a strange 5-ft
long, blue-gray fish
with fins that resembled
gross, stumpy legs.
Together, Courtenay-Latimer and
a nearby chemistry professor
and amateur ichthyologist,
named J. L. B. Smith,
worked to identify the
newly discovered fish
and realized that that order
of coelacanth had survived,
unrecognized, unappreciated, and unloved,
into the present day.
Today, there are only two
known species of coelacanth left alive:
the Latimeria menadoensis
and Latimeria chalumnae.
Both get their genus name
from Courtenay-Latimer.
Now, no one knows exactly
how many specimens
of each species are left on earth,
but scientists consider both
to be rare and threatened,
which is just one reason
why you shouldn't eat them.
The known coelacanth
populations left alive today
can usually be found near caves
around deep, rocky areas off
the coast of volcanic islands.
During the daytime they
usually hide inside the caves,
and at night they emerge to hunt,
which they do by passively
floating in the water,
waiting for favorite snacks like squid
and octopus to drift by.
So really it just sounds
like me in college.
The brain of an adult coelacanth takes up
less than 1.5% of its cranial cavity.
The other 98.5% of the cavity
is literally just full of fat.
You can chalk this up to something called
negative allometric growth,
when an organ doesn't grow as
fast as the rest of the body.
When the coelacanth is young,
its brain takes up much
more of the cranial cavity,
but as the fish grows bigger,
the brain doesn't grow proportionally.
The skull keeps getting bigger,
but the brain stays the same.
Poor derpy fish.
Unlike any other living fish species,
coelacanths have a special
intracranial joint that
works like a hinge for the
anterior portion of their skulls.
Together with the muscle
underneath the upper jaw
known as the basicranial muscle,
this hinge helps coelacanth
generate a stronger bite force.
They also have a unique
rostral organ in the nose
which they use as part of
their electrosensory system.
Very fancy.
Have you ever been
curious to taste the meat
of an endangered, ancient animal?
Sure, we all have.
But let us insist:
you do not want to eat a coelacanth.
Its meat has been described as
slimy, oily, and mucus
covered with a foul smell.
Not unlike the stuff in my college fridge.
Even better, coelacanth
flesh is full of urea,
which is a nitrogen-based compound
that your kidneys cleanse from your blood
and then you excrete in your pee.
Yeah, so it's kind of like
eating greasy urine flesh fish.
But...
it's also full of wax
esters, which are molecules
of indigestible junk that your body
will probably discharge in a flood
of unstoppable oily diarrhea.
Local fish catchers call it
"gombessa", meaning taboo,
suggesting that there's
already cultural knowledge
that this guy is not good for eating.
So if Captain D's jumps on
that irony-based food bandwagon
and launches an ad campaign for
a double-fried coelacanth
taco or whatever...
just consider yourself warned.
I'm just reelin' in some videos.
Well what's your favorite
derpy ocean creature?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you want to learn more,
check out How the Coelacanth Works at
howstuffworks.com
