Recollections of the Past 30 years pursuing Coelacanths
Jerome Hamlin, creator dinofish.com
The best professional advice I could get from aquarium personnel was that a coelacanth would probably not survive more than a week in the transporter tank we had in the Comoros. That might not be long enough to complete a ressusitation of the fish to enable it to survive a release back into the ocean. I began to consider that we needed a larger, more permanent set up in the Comoros. At the same time, rumors were circulating that coelacanths had been caught off of Madagascar, where they had not been known to exist. The Comoros were still the only know habitat. (A large pregnant female caught off Maputo, Mozambique, in 1991, was thought to have been a stray from the Comoros.) And adding to these bits and pieces, I had inside information that a member of the coelacanth conservation group, the C.C.C., was planning his own live capture program for a South African aquarium. 1994 seemed like a good year to go back and look into all of this.
I applied for and received an Explorers Club expedition flag for "Mad-Com," the Madagascar-Comoros Coelacanth Expedition. Some boxes of equipment including liners and pumps from a pool company were shipped ahead to the Comoros. Then with my new partner in life, Diana Dyjak Montes de Oca, I flew to Anatanarivo, Madagascar via Johanesburg, South Africa, sporting my first Hi 8 video camera, and a SteadtCam Jr. to stabilize the shots.
In 1991, editor, Prof Eugene Balon, thoughtfully published my article "Can Colacanths be Caught on Demand?"in his prestigeous scientific journal, "The Environmental Biology of Fishes." It made me at last, a quasi member the scientific community.
After taking in the exotic sights of Antanarivo and nearby lemur reserves, we hired a pickup truck and driver to make a diffucult journey up the east coast from Tomasino to Manampurna, following up on the coelacanth leads provided by Robin Stobbs in South Africa. This was a wild stretch of country indeed, with many river crossings by car ferry. One cagey hotel owner along the way acknowledged that he had seen a coelacanth caught but offered no proof. A shaman fisherman in Manampona, wearing a Hollywood T shirt, said he had caught one. He was very convincing until he said it flew, and waved his arms in the air. With these inconclusive hints we made the jump flight over to the Comoros, only about an hour away by jet.
After coordinating our materials, we set up a meeting with the new director of the C.N.D.R.S. in Moroni. I had already heard that by chance, the German submersible group was in the Comoros. When I arrived for our meeting with the director, low and behold Dr Raphael Plante, the French Oceanographer, was in the room, having stayed behind from a meeting of his own, no doubt to see what we were up to. I thought that was a bit much, but he was very charming, and spoke impeccable English. Once assured that we weren't trying to catch coelacanths, he offered me to join a press junket out to their mothership that afternoon. I accepted quite eagerly and was not disappointed.
