The Sulawesi coelacanth: the 'king of the sea' of Manado Tua

The first living coelacanth turned up off East London, South Africa, in 1938. A population in the Comoros was found after a 14-year search. The Comoran fish, the gombessa, is dark blue with white flecks. For decades, science knew of no other home for it.

September 18, 1997. Manado, North Sulawesi. Mark V. Erdmann, a UC Berkeley marine biologist, was on honeymoon with Arnaz Mehta, a nature guide. At the fish market, Arnaz Mehta spotted it first. A large, strange fish on a cart sold by an elderly man.

Erdmann took it for a gombessa. Then he noticed the colour. Brown, not blue. Several feet long, with stumpy, lobed appendages where other fish have conventional fins. He simply couldn't believe he was looking at something unknown to science. He photographed it and talked to the fisherman. Then the fish was sold. He would later regret not keeping it.

From November 1997, Erdmann spent about five months interviewing more than 200 fishermen. Two said they caught the fish now and then. They called it raja laut. King of the sea. Locals described fish up to 2 m long and 65 kg. Fishermen did not eat it, but it was sometimes sold to unsuspecting buyers at the market.

July 30, 1998. Sunrise. Om Lameh Sonatham and his crew of ten fishermen hauled in their deep-set shark gill-net off Manado Tua, a young volcanic island in Bunaken Marine Park. In it was a living coelacanth.

They brought it to Erdmann, barely alive. The team towed it behind their boat to revive it, then photographed it in shallow water. For more than three hours, Erdmann photographed and filmed it swimming with local people and with his wife. Some accounts say it lived six hours. It was a female, 124 cm long, 29.2 kg, carrying three eggs. Brown with white flecks, with gold reflections off the scales beneath its eye.

The find made the cover of Nature on September 24, 1998. Two days later, President B. J. Habibie announced it in Manado. The frozen fish went to the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, LIPI, and is kept at the Museum Zoologi Bogor.

Then came the quarrel. In March 1999, Pouyaud and colleagues named the fish Latimeria menadoensis in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, without involving Erdmann. Pouyaud and two colleagues also claimed they had known of the species since 1995, offering a photo said to come from Pangandaran Bay, south Java. In 2000, Nature judged it "clearly an altered copy of a photograph of a live coelacanth taken off Manado Tua on 30 July 1998."

No one has ever claimed the Manado Tua fish was a hoax. It was collected, preserved and DNA-sequenced. Genetic studies still disagree on when it parted from the Comoran fish, with estimates from 1.2 million to 40 million years. Coelacanths were later filmed off Sulawesi in 2006, and off Manado Tua in 2009.

Erdmann called it "a humbling and exciting reminder… that humans have by no means conquered the oceans." The raja laut had been there all along. The fishermen of Manado already knew its name.