by Mike Bruton
‘In 1964 I joined the penultimate voyage of the RV Anton Bruun. … On board were twenty scientists, many from the USA. I was not surprised to see them using the Sea Fishes of Southern Africa as their prime reference – we were in the SW Indian Ocean after all. But I was most impressed to learn that even in California this book was used for teaching tertiary level ichthyology “because it was the best illustrated book of its sort, in the world”. Although many of the species would have been different, it was an invaluable reference work for higher level classification’ (J Wallace, pers. comm., 2017).
The number of marine fishes known from South Africa had increased from fewer than 200 (recorded by Andrew Smith in 1849), to 260 in 1897 and 336 in 1901 (by JDF Gilchrist1), 670 in 1903 (by L Péringuey), 718 in 1905 (by KH Barnard; Gon, 2002) and to 1,005 species in Barnard’s (1925, 1927) two-volume monograph. But the real increases occurred after JLB Smith became involved in marine fish systematics. In the 1953 edition of his The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa 1,325 species are recorded, of which 315 (23.8%) are endemics (Smith, 1977), and 1,400 species are recorded in the 1961 edition of the book. In the last edition of Smiths’ Sea Fishes published by Struik Nature (Smith & Heemstra, 2003) the number of species has increased to over 2,200 2.
1Dr John DF Gilchrist (1866–1926) is regarded as the ‘Father of South African ichthyology’ in recognition of the pioneering role that he played at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a highly productive scientist and administrator who established the Marine Biological Survey (now the Sea Fisheries Research Institute) and arranged for the purchase of the first sea fisheries research vessel, the Peter Faure. He also initiated taxonomic research on our fishes and made the first comprehensive fish collections. But, like JLB Smith, he also had his quirks and eccentricities. At the South African College, where he taught, he had a reputation for being absent-minded. He once passed a lady he thought he knew and courteously raised his hat, to which she indignantly responded, ‘Surely, John, you know your own wife?’ (Gon, 1993).
2As there are about 15,000 marine fish species in the world, this is a very diverse regional fish fauna. This high diversity is due to three main factors: the high diversity of habitats, the fact that the fish fauna is composed of species from three major biogeographic zones (Indo-Pacific, Atlantic and Antarctic), and the high proportion of endemic species (about 13%) (Gon, 1996, 2002).
CHAPTER 16
The second coelacanth
‘It was more than worth … all that long strain’
EVER SINCE the capture of the first coelacanth it had become an obsession of JLB Smith’s to find the home of ‘old fourlegs’ and to secure a second, intact specimen. In the late 1940s he planned to organise an expedition specifically to find coelacanths. However, he received little support for this idea, so he changed his plan and broadened the scope of his expeditions to include the collection of all types of fishes, while always keeping an eagle eye out for coelacanths and talking to local fishermen about them. In 1948, in his quest for the next coelacanth, he had a leaflet printed in English, French and Portuguese, the main European languages used in East Africa at the time. The printing of the leaflets was partly sponsored by the proceeds of an exhibition on the coelacanth that Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had organised at the East London Museum. The text in the leaflet is simply written and would have been intelligible to most readers, but the postal address given for Smith (‘Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Union of S.A.’), seems a little thin!
The £100 reward poster.
On the leaflet Smith offered a £100 reward (sponsored by the CSIR), a considerable amount of money at that time (‘equivalent to a year’s salary for most people in Africa’, Bergh et al., 1992; ‘half the price of a small car at the time’, Spargo, 2008), for the capture of a second coelacanth. This was another example of his unconventional yet practical thinking. It must have felt strange for the new leaders of the CSIR, bent on launching cutting-edge South African science onto the international stage, to approve this zany project. The leaflets were distributed throughout East Africa on the Smiths’ expeditions, to officials, fishermen, traders and boat skippers, anyone who might encounter a coelacanth. It was a great delight to the Smiths when they spotted their leaflets stuck to the walls of lighthouses and huts in the remotest parts of East Africa.
Local fishermen found it hard to believe that anyone would pay £100 (10,000 escudos) for one dead fish, but from then onwards the coelacanth became known as ‘Dez Contos Peixe’, literally the ‘Ten Thousand (escudos) Fish’ – or the ‘Hundred Pound Fish’. It is interesting to note that French colonial officers in Madagascar and the Comoros showed far less enthusiasm for distributing Smith’s reward leaflets than did their Portuguese counterparts in Mozambique (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). JLB’s incentive campaign paid dividends during his search for the coelacanth, but it may have hampered later conservation efforts to reduce fishing pressure on the natural populations of this species. In an international coelacanth conservation campaign launched by the famous German researcher, Professor Hans Fricke, this author and others in the late 1980s and 1990s, CITES (the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) was persuaded to list the coelacanth on Schedule I, which means that it may not be traded for commercial gain.
When Smith examined the first coelacanth, he realised immediately that it was not a deep-water fish (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). It had hard scales, a heavy, bony head and strong fins with spines as found in typical reef fishes, and it was brightly coloured, like other shallow-water fishes. It also had moderately large eyes like those found in fishes that live in well-lit waters. By contrast, deep-water fishes are typically dark in colour, often black or grey, and have soft bodies with no or few scales, soft rays in their fins, and light bones. Their eyes are either enormous and very sensitive, with giant pupils, or they have disappeared completely, and they often have huge jaws and small though expandable bodies for taking occasional large meals. Furthermore, many deep-sea fishes are bioluminescent – capable of producing light biologically through the excitation of an enzyme, luciferin.
Smith speculated that the first coelacanth, caught off East London, was a stray from further north that had drifted southwards on the south-flowing Mozambique/Agulhas Current. He deduced that coelacanths are mainly tropical fishes that live further north, and therefore decided to mount expeditions along the East African coast in an effort to find more of these fishes. Smith (1956) presented his reasoning in very user-friendly terms in Old Fourlegs:
‘When I looked at that fish, even the first time, it said as plainly as if it could speak: “Look at my hard, armoured scales. They overlap so that there is a three-fold thick layer of them over my whole body. Look at my bony head and stout spiny fins. I am so well protected that no rock can hurt me. Of course I live in rocky areas, among reefs, below the action of the waves and the surf, and, believe me, I am a tough guy and not afraid of anything in the sea. No soft deep-sea ooze for me. My blue colour alone surely tells you that I cannot live in the depths. You don’t find blue fishes there.”’
Smith also hypothesised that the coelacanth is a tough, rocky-reef-dwelling, ambush predator (Smith, 1965), and once again he was right. This represents an extraordinary example of how a scientist (and angler) with a keen eye for detail can decipher the living habits of an animal from its anatomy. This was despite the fact that the first coelacanth had been caught in an atypical habitat, and the second from an unknown habitat off Anjouan. Smith’s knowledge of living fishes allowed him to make far more accurate predictions about their likely habitat preferences and hunting behaviour than EI White or other scientists, whose expertise lay mainly in the study of extinct fossil fishes or preserved modern fishes.
In addition to rocky reefs off the East African mainland coast, Smith also proposed that coelacanths may live off the Western Indian Ocean islands, in particular off the huge, ancient island of Madagascar. Because of the continuity of the Indian Ocean environment, the marine fi
sh fauna off Madagascar has lower levels of endemicity than its land animals, and many of its fish are shared with other Western Indian Ocean islands and the African mainland. On his last expedition to Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, Smith had looked longingly across the Indian Ocean towards the Comoros, about 200 kilometres away, and speculated that coelacanths might occur there. In an article published posthumously in the Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa he even imagined ‘natives feasting on succulent coelacanth steaks on a remote Madagascar shore’ (Smith, 1971; Spargo, 2008).
Smith’s conclusion that coelacanths most likely live among rocks in areas that are remote from zoologists, but at moderate depths accessible to traditional hook-and-hand-line fishermen in the tropics of East Africa, was supported by the British scientist JR Norman (author of the authoritative History of Fishes). Norman suggested that ‘long-baited lines perhaps hold out the best chance of catching fresh specimens’ (Norman, 1939). Most coelacanths have, in fact, been caught by hand-line fishermen (Bruton & Stobbs, 1991; Nulens et al., 2011), and we now know from Hans Fricke’s work that their depth preferences in the Comoros range between 100 and 800 metres. As the average depth of the oceans is 3,688 metres, coelacanths are relatively shallow-water fishes.
In contrast, other fish experts from England, particularly EI White, as well as from France and Denmark, concluded that the coelacanth was a fish of the deep abyss, and fruitless expeditions were mounted by Jacques Millot in collaboration with Jacques-Yves Cousteau (co-inventor with Émile Gagnan of the aqualung) and his Calypso crew in 1954 and 1963 to find them in deep water. Alas, Cousteau, or ‘Captain Planet’ as he had been nicknamed, who had probably seen more live fish under the sea than any other human at the time, was destined never to see a living coelacanth in its natural habitat. The only live specimen that he ever saw was the eighth coelacanth known to Western scientists, which was caught on 12th November 1954 off Mutsamudu and kept alive in an overturned boat for 24 hours.
As an angler, Smith (1956) was even able to predict correctly how a coelacanth would play, once hooked; they would be dogged fighters, like rock cods and groupers. Traditional Comorian fishermen who have caught coelacanths know immediately when they have hooked one by the reactions of the fish. Unlike oilfish or sharks, which tug hard and fast, they described how gombessa (their name for the coelacanth) are comparatively slow and tenacious, like groupers (sahali), and may take up to two hours to bring to boat.
Although JLB Smith was the first to offer a reward for a coelacanth, he later strongly discouraged this practice after numerous coelacanths had been caught by traditional fishermen (and then bought or confiscated by the French authorities). The French had offered a reward of $280 for a dead specimen and $560 for a live one. Cousteau, who also disapproved of this policy of offering a reward to catch a rare fish, commented that Comorian fishermen had practically abandoned fishing for food, instead going ‘fishing for money’; and he lamented, after the capture of the eighth specimen, ‘… two more wealthy fishermen joined the local coelacanth aristocracy’ (Gon, 1998).
In a letter to the editor of The Times of London published on 4th June 1956, JLB Smith stated:
‘Investigation indicates that the coelacanth evidently frequents a certain depth zone, so that the available Comoran habitat for coelacanths must be restricted. All the evidence indeed indicates that there cannot be any high population of coelacanths there. If, as is quite likely, these are the only coelacanths in existence, there may well be only a few hundred of them in all. In the last three years the French have got ten specimens, more than enough for full scientific investigation. Science and the world are no longer crying for dead coelacanths. The only excuse for further hunting of coelacanths at the Comores is that mankind may be able to see one alive in an aquarium.
‘It is disturbing that no habitat for coelacanths other than the Comores has been found. Nothing has transpired about the international expedition, and apparently no coelacanths have been taken in these three years other than by the lines of native fishermen, induced by large rewards to concentrate on hunting coelacanths. If a herd of dinosaurs were discovered in some remote jungle the world would rightly recoil in horror from a policy of rewarding natives to slaughter as many as possible. The situation of the Comoran coelacanths is in reality no better, and the present policy is debasing a once important scientific quest to the level of senseless slaughter of one of our most precious heritages in biology. The French own the Comores, but the coelacanth belongs to science and to mankind. … The policy of rewarding natives for catching coelacanths should immediately be reversed, or modified, to that of a severe punishment for killing one.’
As can be imagined, this letter was not well received by the French.
In September 1952, during their long fish-collecting expedition to Kenya and Tanzania, the Smiths mounted an exhibition of some of their catches in Zanzibar and distributed their reward leaflets. There they met Eric Ernest Hunt, skipper of the schooner N’duwaro (‘billfish’ in kiSwahili), who traded between Tanzania and the Comoros. Hunt was no ordinary mariner. He was born in London in 1915 to a respectable family and schooled at Eton. He was a dashing, handsome man whom some described as ‘a dead ringer for Errol Flynn (only shorter)’ (Weinberg, 1999). He was a qualified engineer who first came out to East Africa in 1935 as a motor mechanic and then ran a ferry service on Lake Victoria. At the outbreak of the Second World War he enlisted with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and served in Abyssinia and East Africa, where he received citations for bravery.
After the war Hunt decided not to return to England, forsaking the comfortable life of an English gentleman to go adventuring off the east coast of Africa (Weinberg, 1999; McGregor, 2015). With progressively larger vessels, he traded tea and coffee, spices, cloths and cloves. He was also an accomplished aquarist who set up aquaria for freshwater and marine fishes in his home in Zanzibar and had a particular interest in the strange lifestyles and breeding habits of freshwater killifish (Nothobranchius species). Like Smith, his passion for fish arose from a love of angling. He was also greatly concerned about the destruction of marine life through the uncontrolled use of pesticides, long before environmental activism became popular (Stobbs, 1996b).
Hunt showed real interest in the coelacanth, questioned the Smiths in detail about their quest, and took copies of the reward leaflets to the Comoros on his next trip. The Smiths, in the meantime, travelled to Kenya to collect fishes, and then called in at Zanzibar on their return. There Margaret met Hunt again and, as they parted, he joked, ‘When I get a coelacanth, I’ll send you a cable’. They both burst out laughing but Margaret did remark to Smith later, ‘… that man is all there, I think we can rely on his judgement if ever he gets a coelacanth; he is sound’ (Smith, 1956).
Eric Hunt (right) with the coelacanth reward poster in Zanzibar.
The Smiths returned from their 1952 expedition in relative luxury aboard the Dunottar Castle, one of the ‘old ladies’ of the Union-Castle fleet. This may seem strange to modern scientists but it was the only way in which they could travel back to South Africa with their large fish collections1.
On board the Dunottar Castle in the 1950s a bugler would have called the guests to meals and the scrumptious menu would have included turtle soup, parsnip fritters, roasted pheasant, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Dover sole, foie-gras, truffles, plover’s eggs, cock’s kidneys and crayfish tails. Lawrence Green, a regular voyager on the ‘lavender liners’ in the 1940s and 1950s, mentions that the turtle soup was made from the flesh and fat of the green turtle, Chelonia mydas, simmered for three days with basil, thyme, parsley, celery and tomatoes. Some ships had cows, hens and chickens on their poop decks to provide fresh food (Green, 1958).
They are likely to have had little appetite for the ship’s entertainments (cinema, tombola, dancing and card games), let alone its epicurean menu. It would not be surprising if they had stayed in their cabin during meal times (wearing their khaki outfits) and warmed up a
tin of pilchards and peas on their primus stove for dinner! They would also no doubt have pored over and organised their expedition notes and carefully plotted out the process of archiving and illustrating the fishes that they had collected once they returned to Grahamstown. Little did they know that their carefully laid plans would soon be thrown into complete disarray!
When the Dunottar Castle slowly slid over the bar into Durban harbour early in the morning of Wednesday, 24th December 1952, the Smiths must have breathed a sigh of relief. Their expedition had been hugely rewarding, but they were very glad to be back in South Africa and away from the heat and hardships of the tropics. Smith (1956) commented at the time, ‘It will be a long time before anything gets me back to the tropics’. But their relief would have been short-lived because soon – that very same day, even before disembarking – they would be involved in another mad scramble to secure a coelacanth specimen and, unbelievably, JLB Smith would be back in the tropics within a few days.
Three weeks after Eric Hunt had said goodbye to the Smiths in Zanzibar, he was moored in Mutsamudu on the north coast of Anjouan island in the Comoros and was brought a coelacanth specimen! It had been caught by a traditional fisherman, Ahamadi Abdallah (elsewhere referred to as Achmed Hussein and Achmed Hussein Bourou), using a hand line from a dugout canoe on 20th December 1952. This happened to be a big day in the Comoros, as the islanders were preparing for the Compétitions Sportives de l’Archipel, the annual sports festival, to be held on Mayotte. The principal of the primary school in Domoni, Affene Mohamed (who would later become the Comorian Minister for Cultural Affairs under President Ahmed Abdallah), also happened to be the captain of the Anjouan soccer team, and in preparation for the prestigious event, he visited the local hairdresser near the fish market for a shave. As he passed through the market, he recognised the fish as the one illustrated on the reward leaflet; the fish, the fisherman and the schoolteacher duly hitched a ride in the government truck transporting the soccer team as far as Mutsamudu, where, according to radio cocotier (the Comorian term for ‘bush telegraph’), Hunt’s ship was moored. The fish was a small male, 135 centimetres long and weighing 37.5 kilograms (Smith, 1956; Nulens et al., 2011; Bruton, 2015). In Old Fourlegs Smith (1956) dramatically describes how the fish was manhandled for 25 miles (40 kilometres) along steep mountain paths across deep valleys and through dense forests but the reality is that the journey was carried out in a government truck.2