- 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