The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  Smith wanted to smooth over ruffled feathers and contemplated two plans: one was that he would send the second coelacanth to the USA where it could be dissected by a team of comparative anatomists; or, secondly, he would hand it over to French scientists, as it had been caught in French waters. Fortunately, neither plan needed to be carried out as a third coelacanth was caught in September 1953, also off Anjouan, and a steady stream of specimens was subsequently caught by traditional fishermen off Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli islands (none have ever been caught off Mayotte). The French subsequently prohibited foreign scientists from searching for coelacanths in their waters and proposed instead that an international expedition under French leadership should continue to conduct coelacanth research. This ban lasted until the Comoros gained their independence on 6th July 1975.

  Back home, the second coelacanth was displayed to the public in the Grahamstown City Hall on 9th January 1953. Grahamstown’s only traffic officer, ‘Archie’ Archer, stood in attendance in full uniform, tears streaming down his cheeks from the formalin fumes, as he directed the human traffic that filed past the ‘smelly cadaver’. Professor Jack Rennie recalled, ‘It reminded us of King George V’s death in 1936 when we had processed past the catafalque where his coffin was lying in state’. The coelacanth was later also available for viewing at Smith’s laboratory.

  The second coelacanth specimen on display at a Civic Reception hosted by the City of Grahamstown on 9th January 1953. The cast of the first coelacanth was on loan from the East London Museum.

  ‘During this time we estimated that not less than twenty thousand people came to look at old man Coelacanth. Not many humans have achieved that in death. It reminded me of Lenin in his glass coffin, or dead royalty in state’ (Smith, 1956).

  Smith also commented:

  ‘A coelacanth can do strange things to scientists. My wife and I posed for photographs and became ciné and television stars. I would leave broadcasting engineers fixing a tape machine in my office to face more flash-bulbs or to wave the Coelacanth’s fin for a ciné. We were told that within three days a television record from our laboratory had been shown all over America, and later we got letters from scientist friends in remote places like Japan, Alaska, and Timor to say they had seen us on the screen. … In this process an obscure and highly scientific term became part of the common speech of mankind.’

  At about this time Glynn Hewson, a neighbour in Grahamstown, wrote:

  ‘With the dramatic discovery of the coelacanth at the end of 1952, its seemed as if the world found special time for Gilbert Street and the department down the road. Suddenly one morning there was a TV crew outside on the street, or there would be people knocking on our front door to ask where the Smiths lived. And such was the nature of the relationship between our homes that Margaret Smith thought nothing of asking us to host guests from abroad who had come to see the Smiths or enquire about some aspect of the coelacanth story. Their house and lifestyle did not easily accommodate such intrusions!

  ‘The celebrated palaeontologist, Eigil Nielson of Copenhagen, was one such visitor who gave an outstanding public lecture on coelacanth fossils of Greenland: Thursday, August 6, 1953. Another was the writer and author, Quentin Keynes (a nephew of John Maynard Keynes, so he was quick to tell us!) who arrived en route to the Comore islands on his first trip and then, on his second, in the company of a man with dark hair and eyes (the son of Laurence Olivier, so he was again quick to tell us!).’

  In October 1953 Smith attended a meeting in Nairobi of the Scientific Council for Africa, with Jacques Millot and Maurice Menaché from France and Alwyn Wheeler and EB Worthington from England to discuss future research on the coelacanth, but exactly the same impasse occurred as had taken place seven years earlier in South Africa, when the CSIR had wanted to organise a general oceanographic expedition, as opposed to Smith’s more narrowly focused plans. Smith now proposed an expedition with the express purpose of catching coelacanths whereas the others favoured a broader oceanographic survey that would include a coelacanth search. Once again, Smith’s obstinate pursuit of a narrowly defined goal bumped up against the broader, more holistic approach adopted by the staff of large, state-aided institutions. Both points of view had their merits, but the scientists could not reach consensus.

  Maurice Menaché, Jacques Millot, EB Worthington and JLB Smith at the meeting of the Scientific Council for Africa in Nairobi in October 1953.

  Smith told the other delegates that he would not join an oceanographic investigation but that his knowledge and experience would always be at their service. He then informed them that he would continue with his own plans for hunting coelacanths and described how he would try to keep one alive in a large decked boat that had been partially filled with sea water. According to Smith (1956), the tense meeting in Nairobi had its lighter moments:

  ‘We were discussing personnel and equipment for the vessels, and it was established there would be quite a number of scientists and assistants on each. One Frenchman said, “It weel be necessairy to provide a wench on each ship.” This certainly shook the Britishers. As they looked up sharply I could see in their faces the unspoken comment, “It may be the tropics, but really ….” I said mildly, “He means winch”; and there was some laughter, which the French at first did not understand.’

  Although the Nairobi delegates had not supported Smith’s proposal, he nevertheless had a deep feeling of contentment after the get-together. The home of the coelacanth had been found, as he had predicted, in the tropics of the Western Indian Ocean in relatively shallow water. The French had obtained their own coelacanth (the third, in September 1953, with six more being caught in the Comoros in 1954), and plans were under way for international research on the fish. He felt that he had met all his obligations regarding ‘old fourlegs’ and could concentrate again on his work on the other marine fishes of East and South Africa. He also realised that he would be able to keep his second coelacanth specimen as there was no longer a need for it to be sent away for international study.

  As it turned out, from 1953 onwards the French ban thwarted any plans Smith might have had to hunt for coelacanths in the Comoros and Madagascar. One year later, in November 1954, French officials in Mutsamudu used the method proposed by Smith to keep a coelacanth alive and made the first observations on a living fish (Millot, 1955b); the front page of Le Monde was proudly headlined, Notre Coelacanthe! (‘Our Coelacanth’). The fish, a 41-kilogram immature female, was captured off Mutsamudu at 20h00 and kept in a small sunken boat from about 23h30 to 15h30 the next day (Nulens et al., 2011). The people of Mutsamudu spent the night dancing and singing to celebrate this momentous event (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969) but Millot ignored the festivities and was able briefly to study the live fish just before it died, noting that it avoided bright light and readily took fresh fish.

  In 1953 the Daily Mirror in London announced that the London Zoo had prepared a special large aquarium and offered a reward of £1,000 for a live coelacanth. In Old Fourlegs JLB Smith (1956) expressed his desire to have a live coelacanth on display:

  ‘It had long been my ambition to catch a Coelacanth alive so that the ordinary man could see it in an aquarium, and be given the opportunity to look back to the kind of creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. There is probably no other true scientific story which has given the ordinary man so clear a vision of what is meant by time, and to have a live Coelacanth on view would round it off in a way that H.G. Wells would certainly have appreciated. It was in one sense his idea of a “Time Machine” come true.’

  JLB’s appeal for a coelacanth to be seen by ‘the ordinary man’ in an aquarium was echoed by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in 1998 and by this author too, on several occasions since 1997.1

  French scientists acquired most of the next 25 coelacanths caught in the Comoros, and by late 2011, 45 coelacanth specimens had been lodged in museums in France (the largest number in any country) with a further 10 in Madagascar. Of those whose capture
locality is known, 215 of the 299 ‘African’ coelacanth specimens have been caught off the Comoros (Nulens et al., 2012; Bruton, 2015, 2017). Jacques Millot, James Anthony and later Daniel Robineau made extremely detailed studies of coelacanth anatomy and published their results in a series of scientific papers and a comprehensive, three-volume monograph, ‘L’Anatomie de Latimeria chalumnae’, between 1954 and 1978 (Millot, 1953, 1954a, b, c; 1955a, b; Millot & Anthony, 1958, 1965, 1974; Robineau 1976; Robineau & Anthony, 1971, 1973; Millot et al., 1973, 1975, 1978). It was perhaps the last great accomplishment in formal descriptive anatomy; the great Victorian tradition of highly detailed descriptions had ended and the era of quick, short descriptions had begun.

  Jacques Millot dissecting a coelacanth in Paris.

  In 1954 and again in 1963 Jacques Millot, in collaboration with Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his team on the dive ship Calypso, searched for coelacanths using electronic flash photography off the Comoros, Seychelles and Aldabra, but without luck (Smith, 1956). In 1954, an Italian dive team led by Franco Prosperi secretly (and illegally) dived off Mayotte and claimed to have photographed a live coelacanth, but the photograph that they published in Paris and London turned out to be a fake – it was an inflatable coelacanth! In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s further coelacanth research expeditions were launched to the Comoros from Britain, France, Canada, the USA and Belgium, some of which tried to catch live specimens, once again without success.

  Smith was right about coelacanths occurring in Madagascar, but the first specimen from there known to Western scientists was only caught on 5th August 1995, in gill nets laid for sharks near Anakao, 30 kilometres south of Soalary (Heemstra et al., 1996; Nulens et al., 2011). This was nearly 43 years after the first Comorian coelacanth, although these fish have almost certainly been caught by traditional fishermen in both localities for centuries (Stobbs & Bruton, 1996). The Madagascar coelacanth was recognised by Dominique Couttin, a visitor to Anakao, in a fisherman’s catch. She bought it for US $6 and donated it to the Institut Halieutique et des Sciences Marines at the University of Toliara. To date (October 2017), 13 coelacanth specimens are known from Madagascar, the third most after the Comoros (215) and Tanzania (officially 63, but probably more than 80). Madagascar has also yielded a rich bounty of coelacanth fossils; extinct species in the genera Coelacanthus, Piveteauia and Whiteia have all been found in Triassic deposits there.

  In June 1956, in the first publication on coelacanth conservation, JLB Smith wrote a caustic letter to The Times of London suggesting that the French had sufficient specimens and that their present policy is ‘debasing a once important scientific quest to the level of senseless slaughter of one of our most precious heritages in biology’, but he got a robust response. Gavin de Beer, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), responded the next day, ‘When Professor Smith states that science and the world are no longer crying for dead coelacanths he forgets that, while he may possess a specimen, other museums such as this have need for one, and have been promised specimens by our generous French colleagues’. On 5th June 1956 the New York Post nevertheless supported Smith with an article headlined ‘Senseless slaughter of rare fish assailed’.

  The following week Millot weighed in, ‘If Professor Smith were an anatomist he would realize that, for an extensive study … of the kind we are pursuing … a dozen specimens are hardly sufficient’, and then directs a sharp jab at Smith’s controversial fish-collecting methods, ‘In particular they [the Comorians] must be credited with having protected the coelacanths from being dynamited with depth-charges, which, though hardly believable but nevertheless true, Professor Smith twice proposed to do’.

  In 1963 Smith wrote a dramatic article entitled, ‘The Atomic Bomb and the Coelacanth’, in which he stated, ‘In my view there is a very real danger that this priceless heritage from the past may suffer extermination unless steps are taken to prevent it’. Also in 1963, on the 25th anniversary of the first capture, he gave a rousing speech during which he appealed for the formation of an international society to conserve the coelacanth. Unfortunately, nothing came of his proposal but, in April 1987, during a later coelacanth research expedition to the Comoros, Eugene and Christine Balon, Richard Cloutier and this author founded the Coelacanth Conservation Council/Conseil pour la Conservation du Coelacanthe (CCC) in a café in Moroni. The CCC subsequently played a major role in cataloguing coelacanth catches and promoting and co-ordinating coelacanth research and conservation internationally.

  In Old Fourlegs JLB Smith speculated that ‘… the coelacanth doubtless sheds its eggs inside a special case, quite possibly like those produced by some sharks and rays. Who will be the first to find one?’ (Smith, 1956). In arguably the biggest faux pas of his career, he did not accept the gift of the 29th coelacanth, a 65-kilogram female caught in 1962 off Mutsamudu, when it was offered to him by Dr Georges Garrouste of Madagascar, on the basis that his coelacanth work was done. He recommended that they should rather send it to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York.

  Coelacanth yolksac juvenile found inside a pregnant female dissected at the American Museum of Natural History.

  Fourteen years after receiving this coelacanth specimen, and eight years after JLB Smith had died, scientists at the AMNH finally dissected it and, to their amazement, found a litter of pups inside the pregnant mother! For once JLB Smith’s prediction had been wrong: the coelacanth contained five embryos, the first evidence that the coelacanth is a live-bearer, not an egg-layer, like most fish. In fact, coelacanths have a very advanced breeding strategy as they produce a few, very large eggs (the largest of any fish, about the size of an orange) and have the longest gestation period (about 36 months) of any animal, 12 months longer than that of the African elephant. They give birth to a few large juveniles (not more than 36, according to our present knowledge) that resemble the adults. The AMNH discovery was announced by James Atz in an article entitled ‘Latimeria babies are born, not hatched’ (Atz, 1976) and in 1979 the American Museum donated a cast of one of the embryos to the Ichthyology Institute in Grahamstown.

  In 1965 the French decided that they had enough coelacanths, moved their operational base from the Comoros to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and handed over the responsibility for the distribution of further coelacanth catches to the Comorian authorities. The Comorians were delighted, and instituted a practice whereby fishermen were obliged to sell coelacanths to the government in return for a reward of £100. Thereafter, international coelacanth research became decidedly collaborative and was characterised by ‘coelacanth détente’ from the 1970s onwards, when coelacanth specimens were exchanged as goodwill gifts between the Comoros, France and other countries. The era of coelacanth diplomacy was, in fact, initiated by Millot and Anthony when they donated the 15th coelacanth, a 125-centimetre female caught off Grande Comore in July 1956 (Nulens et al., 2011), to the British Museum (Natural History) in London, where it is still on display today. Since then the French have officially donated coelacanth specimens to Japan, Algeria, China, Kuwait, South Korea, South Africa and even the United Nations in New York.

  In July 2017 an exhibition featuring the coelacanth was held in Kaikyokan, a modern aquarium in Japan, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of their first coelacanth. This specimen was a gift from President Charles de Gaulle to M Shorikim, Head of the Yomiuri Newspaper Company, in recognition of his cultural contributions to France and Japan.

  Multi-national collaboration has since become a feature of coelacanth research and several multi-authored books and journals have been published on their evolution, genetics, anatomy, physiology, demography, feeding, breeding, locomotion, behaviour, habitat preferences and conservation (McCosker & Lagios, 1979; Suzuki et al., 1995; Balon et al., 1988; Fricke et al., 1991; Musick et al., 1991a, b; Benno et al., 2006; Hissmann et al., 2006; Ribbink & Roberts, 2006; Nulens et al., 2011; Bruton, 2017a).

  Margaret Smith (centre) showing the second coelacanth to R
obin Boltt (left) and Burke Hill, Senior Lecturers in Zoology at Rhodes University, in 1966.

  On the 40th anniversary of the capture of the second coelacanth a ’Coelacanth Banquet’ was held at Natal Command in Durban, organised by Professor Mike Laing, which Shirley Bell (pers. comm., 2017) described as ‘one of those crazy, wonderful, unlikely occasions. … It was like finding oneself back in a different era of history.’ Twenty-five people attended, including most of the crew of Dakota 6832. On arrival the guests were served the same ‘treat’ (chocolate cake and red wine) as a frustrated JLB Smith had spurned when he arrived at Dzaoudzi to collect the fish. Willem Bergh showed Shirley his notebook from the epic flight and regaled her with stories of the precarious landing and take-off in Dzaoudzi. Brigadier JH Pretorius, Officer Commanding: Natal Command, together with William Smith, unveiled a plaque: