A little over a month ago, three amateur divers were about to ascend from exploring a reef in Sodwana Bay, off South Africa, when one caught the glint of "a large greenish eye" in his underwater light. Looking more closely, he found it to be the eye of a 2-meter-long coelacanth--an extinct-looking fish with a 380-million-year lineage--alive and well 104 meters deep south of Mozambique. Coelacanthophiles the world over have been thrilled at the news.
Coelacanths had been thought to have died out with the dinosaurs 70 million years ago until one was sighted off South Africa in 1937. Since then, rare individuals have showed up off Indonesia and Africa's east coast, usually in fishers' catches. About 180 have been caught on the volcanic slopes of the Comores Islands, off Mozambique.
In a manuscript submitted to the South African Journal of Science, Phillip Heemstra, an ichthyologist at the J.L.B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown, and colleagues report that on a second visit, divers were able to film three animals, 1 to 1.8 meters long. But a price has already been paid for this latest discovery: One diver, Dennis Harding, died from an uncontrolled ascent.
