Wednesday April 30, 2025
Miami Herald —
Plunging into the crystalline waters of eastern Indonesia, scuba divers followed a steep slope hundreds of feet down. They paused for a minute before beginning their long ascent — and then they saw it.
Hovering near the rock was a rarely seen deep-sea fish: a coelacanth.
A team of marine biologists visited North Maluku in fall 2024 to search for “suspected coelacanth habitats,” according to a study published April 23 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
“Coelacanths are lobe-finned fish that have been around for over 400 million years,” Blancpain Ocean Commitment, who funded the project, said in an April 24 news release. They have a “vestigial lung,” “special fins that move like limbs” and “might live up to 100 years.”