More than seven decades later, the words have the same urgency as when they rolled off Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer’s telegraph machine and into history:
Courtenay-Latimer was the young curator of a natural history museum on South Africa’s east coast. The message came from J.L.B. Smith, an icthyologist to whom she’d turned when, shortly before Christmas in 1938, local fishermen brought her a fish unlike any they’d ever seen.
Caught at a depth of 240 feet, it was five feet long, covered in bony scales and had fins reminiscent of legs. Courtenay-Latimer immediately sent a sketch to Smith, who thought it looked like a coelacanth. There was just one catch: Coelacanths were extinct, and had been for 70 million years.
Smith’s famous cable came too late, as Courtenay-Latimer didn’t have enough formaldehyde to preserve the fish.
It was fourteen years before they learned of another, this time caught off the Comoros Islands, a volcanic archipelago 1,400 miles northeast. Far from being extinct, coelacanths were actually caught with some regularity by native fishermen of the Comoros, on whose rocky undersea slopes they’d lived since swimming with dinosaurs.
In 1986, the German explorer and then-freelance photographer convinced a magazine editor to send him and a submarine to the Comoros. Since then he’s led more than 400 dives, helping to produce much of what is now known about coelacanths.
After the publication of his latest work, published in Marine Biology and entitled “The population biology of the living coelacanth studied over 21 years,” Wired.com talked to Fricke about his time with the mysterious, magnificent creatures.
Wired.com: How did your interest in coelacanths begin?
Hans Fricke: When I was young, I read the book by J.L.B. Smith, Old Four Legs. I was a keen skin diver, because I was 11, and I said, ‘Good friend, this fish you will see once in your life.’ In 1975, I joined an expedition of the Royal Society to Aldabra Atoll, and then I went to the Comoros, where I did some very stupid, very daring scuba dives to down over 300 feet. But I found nothing. I said to my wife, “Next time I come here, I’m coming with a submarine.” I said it as a bit of a joke, but the next time I came to the Comoros, in 1986, I came with a submarine.
Wired.com: Can you describe that first submersible?
Hans Fricke. Dinofish.comFricke: It was made by two Czechoslovakian engineers in Switzerland. We made the first trials in Lake Constance, then I smuggled the submersible over the Swiss-German border, because I would have had to pay customs. It was covered in a sheet and looked like an American Sherman tank. The border policeman asked me, “Friend, what is below this sheet?” I said, “A submarine.” He said, “No.” I said, “Yes it is. I was in the lake diving,” and told him some fish stories. He found it really interesting, and forgot to ask the crucial question: if I’d paid customs. Wired.com: When did you first find a coelacanth?