The Indonesian coelacanth is one of two living species of coelacanth, identifiable by its brown color. It is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN. The other species, L. chalumnae is listed as critically endangered.
Discovery
On September 18, 1997, Arnaz and Mark Erdmann, traveling in Indonesia on their honeymoon, saw a strange fish in a market at Manado Tua, on the island of Sulawesi. Mark Erdmann thought it was a gombessa, although it was brown, not blue. Erdmann took only a few photographs of the fish before it was sold. After confirming that the discovery was unique, Erdmann returned to Sulawesi in November 1997, interviewing fishermen to look for further examples. In July 1998, a fisherman Om Lameh Sonatham caught a second Indonesian specimen, 1.2 m in length and weighing 29 kg on July 30, 1998 and handed the fish to Erdmann. The fish was barely alive, but it lived for six hours, allowing Erdmann to photographically document its coloration, fin movements and general behavior. The specimen was preserved and donated to the Bogor Zoological Museum, part of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. DNA testing revealed that this specimen differed genetically from the Comorian population. Superficially, the Indonesian coelacanth, known locally as raja laut, appears to be the same as those found in the Comoros except that the background coloration of the skin is brownish-gray rather than bluish. This fish was described in a 1999 issue of Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des sciences Paris by Pouyaud et al. It was given the scientific nameLatimeria menadoensis.. The description was published without the involvement or knowledge of Erdmann, who had been independently conducting research on the specimen at the time. In response to Erdmann's complaints, Pouyaud and two other scientists asserted in a submission to Nature that they had been aware of the new species since 1995, predating the 1997 discovery. However the supplied photographic evidence of the purported earlier specimen, supposedly collected off southwest Java, was recognised as a crude forgery by the editorial team and the claim was never published. In 2005, a molecular study estimated the divergence time between the two coelacanth species to be 30–40 mya. On November 5, 2014 a fisherman found a specimen of this species in his net. It was the seventh Indonesian coelacanth found in Indonesian waters since 1998.
Habitat
Teams of researchers using submersibles have recordedlive sightings of the fish in the waters of Manado Tua and the Talise islands off north Sulawesi as well as in the waters of Biak in Papua. These areas share similar steep rocky topography full of caves, which are the habitat of the fish. These coelacanths live in deep waters of around 150 metres or more, at a temperature between 14 and 18 degrees Celsius.
