Wild Life World Conservation

Archive for the ‘Fishes’ Category


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Some of the Earth’s most beautiful organisms- Gold fishes that can be found in all aquariums will be a subject of an ambitious new research programs.

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Humpback whale hunt has suspended in Antartica first time by Japan since the 1960’s after widespread criticism.

Japanese whaling officials confirmed that they had not harpooned any humpbacks yet. They told that the government suspended the hunts of humpback whales would last a year or two.

Japanese scientific whaling research program costs nearly 1,000 whales -mostly minks- a year in the pacific.

The whale meat is sold in specialty restaurants of Japan under this program.

Still waiting my fingers crossed, what will happen to their research program that costs voiceless creatures life…

Humpback whale

Get to Know Coelacanths

Posted on: 22, Dec

The world is filled with weird and wonderful creatures, and a good proportion of them are found deep down in the ocean. We actually know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the deepest parts of the ocean here on planet earth.

Some marine species are of course very carefully studied and can even be found in marine aquariums in living rooms and public aquatic parks around the world. These species are however mostly the ones that are found close to the surface in the wild, e.g. the colourful reef fishes that never ventures further down than 30-40 meters.

For a creature that lives deep down at depths never explored by man, the risk (or chance) of ending up in an aquarium is slim. One of the most interesting beasts to surface from the depths during the 20th century is the Coelacanth.

Coelacanths are bony fishes from the order Coelacanthiformes. What makes them so interesting is the fact that before a living specimen was found during the 1930s, they were believed to have become completely extinct together with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.

In 1936, a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer befriended a Captain Goosen who worked on a trawler off the African coast. Goosen began saving interesting fish specimens for Courtenay-Latimer, and eventually he brought her a primitive looking fish caught about 70 meters (77 yards) from the mouth of the Chalumna River in the Indian Ocean. This strange looking fish turned out to be a true, living Coelacanth.

The finding proved that some Coelacanths had actually survived the through the Cretaceous period and continued to reproduce deep down in the ocean. Who knows what else we might find down there as we continue to explore the mesmerizing depths of the world’s oceans.


 

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