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From: Mongabay.com
Ghost fish: after 420 million years in the deeps, modern gillnets from shark fin trade drag coelacanths into the light
by Tony Carnie on 12 May 2021
Demand for shark fins and oil has led fishers in southwestern Madagascar to set gill-nets in deeper waters. They are finding — and possibly harming — previously-unknown populations of these West Indian Ocean coelacanths.
The landing of the first living coelacanth off the coast of South Africa made world headlines in 1938. Marine scientists were agog. A truly remarkable “four-legged, living fossil fish” had seemingly returned from the dead.
In the ensuing decades, more of these rare and unusual fish were caught off the coastlines of South Africa, Tanzania, and the Comoros Islands; a different coelacanth species turned up in Indonesian waters. ...
Coelacanths in a cave off Grand Comore. Image by Hans Fricke.
Old fish caught by new fishery
Beginning in the 1980s, a new commercial market in China for shark fins and oil prompted fishers off the southwest coast of Madagascar to set large-mesh gill-nets known as jarifa in deeper waters: a startling number of coelacanths have been landed as by-catch. A new study in the SA Journal of Science reviews the data for specimens and puts forward an important hypothesis.
Lead author Andrew Cooke said that while a handful of captures had been reported at the local level in Madagascar, the international scientific literature did not reflect the number caught there.
“When we looked into this further, we were astounded [by the numbers caught]… even though there has been no proactive process in Madagascar to monitor or conserve coelacanths,” says Cooke, who is based at the Antananarivo-based marine resources consultancy Resolve sarl, adding that that well over 100 coelacanths may have been caught off the island in recent decades. ...
Read & See more at: Ghost fish: after 420 million years in the deeps, modern gillnets from shark fin trade drag coelacanths into the light
