Boing Boing has posted an intriguing entry on “Coelacanths in Danger” today.
Who would ever have thought that the coelacanth, “rediscovered” in 1938 & 1952 (off Africa) and then, shockingly, “rediscovered” in 1998 (off Sumatra), would be the topic so quickly of them going extinct.
As Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz observes:
The coelacanth is a fish that was thought to have been extinct for the last 65 million years until it showed up in 1938 near South Africa. Apparently though, it’s really on the verge of extinction this time. Last year, 25 of them were accidentally caught in shallow-water nets. This is unusual because the fish are known to live at depths of 100 to 300 meters.
Meanwhile, what ever happened to the probable new finds of different coelacanth species in other oceans of the world?
Cryptomundo reader and correspondent, Dr. Victor Springer, former Curator of Fishes, and currently Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Smithsonian, sends along the following reply to 2400bc’s above remarks, with permission to post it here:
“Unless this comment above was tongue-in-cheek, the notion that stated species go extinct because or when something better is replacing them is off base. Species can go extinct because of natural phenomena (e.g., a lake with endemic species drying up because the springs that were feeding it dried up) or changes caused by human-induced phenomena, such as pollution or overfishing.”