A Fish For Friday

I created this pic the other day as a joke inspired by one of my friends on Twitter - combining two of my favourite things: Donnie Wahlberg, of New Kids On The Block, and Coelacanths.

I dare say I'll blog plenty in due course about my NKOTB issues but tonight I'll talk about the darling fishies.

I first came across the coelacanth story when I was about 7 years old. I was fascinated from the start about Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young museum curator, who acquired a strange fish which she had an unlikely hunch about. That first "living" (as opposed to fossilised) coelacanth was found in 1938...it took another 14 years for a second specimen to turn up. When you consider that the coelacanth had been presumed extinct for 65 million years 14 years seems nothing but it must've seemed like forever to those at the heart of the tale.

That interminable wait. The accusations that the first specimen was a fraud. The fear that Latimeria Chalumnae might never be seen again... It is a strange yet fascinating story and if you can find a copy of Samantha Weinberg's A Fish Caught In Time I highly recommend it. To write a story that is engaging yet has huge lapses in the pace of the action takes real skill.

The coelacanth in the image above is the less endangered Latimeria Menadoensis (wow, I actually spelled that right on the first attempt!) from Indonesia. It is listed as a vulnerable species. The diver was actually Arnaz Erdmann who was on honeymoon in 1997 when her husband Mark spotted a coelacanth on a barrow in a fish market. Like others who come into contact with the mysterious coelacanth Mark and Arnaz made it their quest to find another specimen. Their wait was fortunately not so long and the second living species was described to science in 1999.

The Indonesian coelacanth, known locally as Rajah Laut, is actually a brown fish, and to me not quite as fascinating as the blue version (artistic impression below) found in the Comoros which is now listed as critically endangered. Because the coelacanth is a deep water fish, known in the Comoros as Gombessa, its vivid blue colouring in life is rarely captured. By the time a fish is brought to the surface it is dying and already losing its colour. All fish are grey in the darkness of the deep...

Edit: In 2014 I combined my two favourite things again - this time Laurence Beveridge of Fearless Vampire Killers, but still a coelacanth ;) And rather than a crappy attempt at image manipulation this is an original painting, acrylic on canvas.

I have painted coelacanths (and Laurence Beveridge many times...but I only attempted to paint Donnie once: