Incredible New Photographs of Live Coelacanths

zapyon writes "German magazine Spiegel Online has just put some incredible photographs of coelacanths on their site. The article is pointing to the current German edition of National Geographic."

Comments

And this is news because...?

[Fallen Kell]

Just wondering why this is news. Coelacanths were discovered to still be living in ~1938. Having photos isn't new, as they had live specimens (and dead ones). There were even 2 species found, not just one.

Re:And this is news because...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a picture of a cool fish is more interesting than what the result of the IT industry Poll for the presidential election?

Re:And this is news because...?

[beckett]

Just wondering why this is news. Coelacanths were discovered to still be living in ~1938. Having photos isn't new, as they had live specimens (and dead ones). There were even 2 species found, not just one.

Google for coelacanth pics and it's almost all dead, preserved specimens. This article is news because despite the dead samples in hand (n.b. no live specimens exist in captivity), little is known about the behaviour of the living coelacanth; encountering one at human-diveable depths is an event in itself. This article is not saying it's the first specimen found; it is basically the best in situ photo ever taken of a living coelacanth.

Re:And this is news because...?

[rs79]

If you think a Coelacanth picture is so easy to get, go take one.

Sure there's already pictures, and video on YouTube. But for the longest time science had never got it's hands on one, they're still fairly "new" as these things go. And they live very far down. This isn't like scooping a fish out of a river or a lake. And there's none in captivity so you can't just take a picture of one; they're endangered now too from overfishing. Stupid as the flesh is pretty much inedible containing waxes, oil and urea at the very least. Things were different half a billion years ago when they evolved (then stopped).

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070730222707AA2bVkB
"Where can I buy a Coelacanth for my aquarium" (you can't)

http://www.dinofish.com/
All things Coelacanth.

"Many expeditions ,often amidst controversy, have sought out the elusive coelacanth, and an extensive bibliography of published papers has emerged."

These new photos are the best ever taken of the fish. They're quite something.

It's not news on Vulcan

[Rogerborg]

Human beings, however, might enjoy simple ape-like wonderment gazing at some modern high quality images of a fish-o-saurus that's said "Fuck you, that's why" to evolution for 65 million years.

Re:It's not news on Vulcan

[daem0n1x]

Reminds me of a cod fish, but uglier. I wonder if it tastes the same...

Fuck, now I'm hungry.

Re:It's not news on Vulcan

[Martin Blank]

I think I remember reading that when the coelocanth was formally rediscovered, some of the local fishermen seemed surprised. They had occasionally dredged them up in their nets, but always tossed them overboard because they tasted so bad. This site suggests that its oily flesh also acts as a powerful laxative.

Probably best to leave them in the water.

Re:It's not news on Vulcan

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention creatures like this should make one wonder....what else is out there? With sats and smartphones, airplanes buzzing around the planet and craft exploring Mars we seem to forget there is still a lot of this planet yet to explore, deep oceans and deep jungles, who knows what is living out there complete unknown to us?

Articles like this are useful if for no other reason than to take us out of our jaded mindset for a few moments to ponder all the different things yet to know, yet to be found, its worth it for that alone IMHO.

Re:It's not news on Vulcan

[rs79]

Shark is excellent eating. Coelacanth not so much, it's not just urea but waxes and oils; eat one and, uh yeah "laxative" is one way of putting it.

Re:Darn kids

[Sulphur]

GET OFF MY LAWN.

Coelacanths on your lawn?

Re:Darn kids

[ackthpt]

GET OFF MY LAWN.

Coelacanths on your lawn?

He should turn down his sprinkler.

Re:My bad

[ackthpt]

I'll be honest; the first thing that popped into my head was trilobites. To me, it was a very interesting news day for about 1.8 seconds.

Typical attention span for the interwebs these days.

Fascinating Animals

[O('_')O_Bush]

I've always wondered how Coelacanth survived for so long. Everything about it is primitive. It has a slow metabolism (or at least the ability to make it slow) and more or less rides the currents to its feeding grounds and back. Very different from the high energy, small, modern fish.

As a species, it has basically been in a evolutionary standstill for 400 million years, and current populations have low genetic diversity (which may be a hint as to why).

My best guess is that some mechanism to not mutate much, flesh that isn't good food for many animals (gives humans upset tummies), a robust way of obtaining food (eating anything), and good energy conservation have probably contributed to its durability as a species. But I would think that lots of species have had these attributes, long ago.

It's habits and characteristics are remarkably similar to another living fossil, the Nautilus.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[Bowling Moses]

Of course biologists do: coelacanths (and insects, and everything else) are evolving. Over the 360 million years coelacanths have been around there have been countless new mutations and new environmental pressures that have shaped the coelacanths. We know of around a hundred coelacanth species that are grouped into not only multiple genera, but multiple families which we can identify from changes in skeletal structure and which we can use as index fossils. They hit upon a successful basic body form a long time ago but they've been evolving the whole time. The only way a species can't evolve is if it goes extinct.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[shutdown -p now]

In truth, there is such a thing as a "local maximum" in evolution - sometimes an organism becomes so well adapted to one particular niche, that it requires a chain of unlikely mutations to get it out of that niche and into something broader where it would have the "incentive" to evolve further. And what with most mutations being harmful or neutral at best (by themselves), they get weeded out by natural selection. Species can get stuck in essentially the same form for a long time if its environment doesn't change. But eventually it always does.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[turkeyfish]

Coelacanths have existed for a few hundred million years longer than Pandas. Their rhipidistina relatives gave rise to tetrapods that eventually came to dominate terrestrial environments.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[Bowling Moses]

Yes, there are a hundred coelacanth species, from dozens of genera, from a half dozen families, grouped into at least two suborders fitting into the order Coelacanthiformes. The taxonomic equivalent for dogs is the order Carnivora. Do you really wish to make a claim roughly equivalent to claiming that bears, badgers, and bobcats could all be due to variety existing in the same Carnivora genome? Keep in mind that Carnivora is only a little more than one-tenth the age of Coelacanthiformes, yet genetic basics like chromosome number can be wildly different. Just within family Ursidae the giant panda has 42 chromosomes, the spectacled bear 52, and the grizzly 74. From this comparison then it is a good bet that the coelacanth genomes of today are quite different from what existed 360 million years ago.

You're a bit muddled in your terms. Darwinian evolution is a collection of ideas which in Darwin's time didn't include mutation. He knew that species change over time, he knew that every group of organisms descended from a common ancestor, he knew that species multiplied by splitting into daughter species, he knew that speciation occurs through gradual processes rather than by saltation (sudden emergence of representatives of a new type), and he gave us one of the mechanisms of evolution: natural selection. Darwin didn't know the origin of new genetic information: mutation. In fact the merging of genetics and natural selection into the neo-Darwinian synthesis didn't happen until around 60 years after Darwin died. You're not getting genetic drift right either.

It is completely accurate to say that the only way species don't evolve is if they go extinct. At the most basic level evolution is simply the change in allele frequency in a population over time. Get a mutation, the allele frequency changes. Natural selection kills something off, ignoring clonal populations that's a change in allele frequency. Whether or not a change is necessary for survival is looking at it wrong. After all, other members of the species are getting along just fine without some specific mutation. A better way of looking at it is to ask if the mutation is compatible with survival. Does the mutation result in a nonviable organism? That's bad. Does it do nothing? Fine. Does it give you an advantage under some or all situations? That's good and as a result you might get more offspring and over time produce a large shift in allele frequency. These changes brought about by mutation and selection (and other evolutionary mechanisms) build up over time and new species inevitably result. There's nothing religious about it.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[rs79]

Brilliant argument, fimd one species that doesn't evolve; this proves the other 100132 million that obviously did evolve are just a fluke easily explained away by this fish

Comic gold.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[Anonymous Coward]

For most of these "living fossils", when you get into the details you discover that they *have* changed, just not very much. The fossil examples look quite similar in superficial ways but are different enough in anatomy that it is clear they are different species. For example, there are about 6 species of modern Nautilus, and while there are plenty of older nautiloids going back hundreds of millions of years, all of the modern species have relatively recent origins and are distinct from the much more ancient ones. The same is true for the modern coelacanth. The ancient specimens are certainly recognizable as coelacanths with anatomy similar to today, but go back far enough and there are differences, and eventually you get to a time when there are coelacanth-like creatures that are fairly different.

"Living fossils" are not creatures that have not changed, they are creatures that haven't changed much, at least in terms of their morphology. They are not in a "standstill", but are changing relatively slowly. This could be because their anatomy works just fine for the niche they have adopted, so selection acts to stabilize it.

Re:Fascinating Animals

[Tablizer]

Crocodiles and Coelacanths have a few things in common: they wait for the food to come to them, or at least use the environment to bring them food or to food. They've mastered patience and metabolic conservation.

Re:Two?

[turkeyfish]

This is not just a neat fish. You are literally looking at a very distant relative of yourself. A number of bones in the fins of these fishes exhibit homology to the bones in your arms and legs.

Holy guacamole !!

[Taco Cowboy]

Went to the site, looked at the pics and holy cow !

If you go to wet markets in sea-side towns on the Borneo Islands you can see they sell this type of fish there !

Irony

[AlexCorn]

Does anyone else appreciate the irony of a fossil fish being presented on what appears to be a fossil web page?

Re:Two?

[MagusSlurpy]

I like coelacanths, and this shouldn't have been on /.

Well, the first half of the byline is "News for Nerds." We may be IT-heavy here, but other sciences do show up from time to time.