The coelacanth and its genome

This special issue of JEZ, Part B (Mol. Dev. Evol.) contains 10 companion papers for the recently published landmark article on the African coelacanth genome (Amemiya et al., 2013). Here, we provide a brief background of the living coelacanth, a historical perspective of the coelacanth genome project, and highlight the major findings of the 10 reports. The first living coelacanth was discovered 75 years ago on December 22, 1938 in South Africa by Marjorie Courtenay‐ Latimer (1919–2004) as by‐catch off the Chalumna River near East London in 1938. She reports: “I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was five foot long, a pale mauvy blue with faintflecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver‐blue‐green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb‐like fins and a strange puppy dog tail” (Weinberg, 2000). This fish, often hailed as the zoological sensation of the 20th century, was described by J. L. B. Smith (the famous South African ichthyologist, after whom an institute would later be named), Latimeria chalumnae, in honor of its discoverer (Smith, '39). The discovery of this fish that belonged to an evolutionary lineage thought to have gone extinct more than 70 million years ago, was, as Smith exclaimed, like seeing a dinosaur walking through the street. This fish appeared overtly similar to its relatives and ancestors that lived from about 400 to about 66 million years ago. Smith went on a quest to locate a second specimen, which was finally found exactly 14 years later, on December 21st 1952 on the Comoron island of Anjouan (Smith, '53). In the gripping science thriller, Old Fourlegs, that hooked all of us into wanting to study the coelacanth, Smith tells the incredulous story describing the hunt for the second living specimen of a coelacanth (Smith, '56). Less than 300 catches of coelacanths are known to science (Bruton and Coutouvidis, '91; unpublished). At least 150 additional coelacanths were observed off the Comoros by Hans Fricke and his team, using a submersible (personal communication). Moreover, additional catches made off Mozambique and Madagascar (Heemstra et al., '96), prove the existence of coelacanth populations throughout the Western Indian Ocean. In another complete surprise, a serendipitous happenstance on a honeymoon to Indonesia in 1997, the first specimen, of what would become the second extant coelacanth species (Latimeria menadoensis), was sighted and photographed in a local fish market. This first specimen could not be secured, but a live specimen was captured off Manado, North Sulawesi in Indonesia (Erdmann et al., '98; Pouyaud et al., '99). Ever since its rediscovery, the coelacanth has been the subject of intense interest and great fascination for both scientists and the general public worldwide (Forey, '88; Thomson, '91; Weinberg, 2000). However, the animal has also been a lightning rod for politics, exploitation, greed, intrigue, fraud, and intense rivalry (Smith, '56; Erdmann and Caldwell, 2000; Weinberg, 2000). Both the African and Indonesian coelacanths are listed as critically endangered and placed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The idea of an African coelacanth genome project was first proposed by one of us (Dorrington) and Greg Blatch, (Rhodes University) late in 2001 following the discovery of coelacanths off the northeast coast of South Africa at Sodwana Bay (Venter et al., 2000). What was remarkable about the Sodwana Bay coelacanths was that they were found at depths of 70–100m, accessible to SCUBA divers, in contrast to the Comoran and Indonesian animals, which occur in deeper waters from 400 to 700m (Fricke, '88; Fricke et al., 2000; Venter et al., 2000). The existence of a viable South African population once again captured the imagination of the scientific community and public at large, prompting Dorrington and Blatch along with researchers from SAIAB (South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity,