Conservationist Discovers Seattle Coelacanth: "They're Sustainable!"

When Bainbridge Island-based conservationist and renowned ocean blogging personality, Mark Powell, donned his wetsuit early Wednesday morning for yet another leg of his epic swim around the Puget Sound Island, he couldn't have imagined that he'd be making history.

"I was worried about suffering serious cramps since I had just eaten four chocolate old-fashioned doughnuts," Powell reported, " but I decided the sun was shining, the water was a balmy 45 degrees F, and I had a spectacular two-foot visibility underwater." Fortune was indeed on his side.

Approximately 12 minutes into his swim, Powell spotted a meter long shape emerge from the Puget Sound murk. "At first I thought it was a cusk or perhaps a salmon," said Powell, "It might have even been a hake or cod. But imagine my shock to discover it was a coelacanth!" Quick thinking and MacGyver-like ingenuity on Powell's part allowed him to quickly affix his underwater camera to a channel buoy using a piece of kelp. Herding the coelacanth into the frame, he managed to snap a picture (above) and secure conclusive evidence of his discovery.

"We swam together for at least five minutes," Powell is quoted saying in The Seattle Times, "It was one of the most transcendent moments of my life swimming alongside the bluish-gray fish. At one point, the coelacanth lifted one of it's paddle-like pectoral fin towards me and I instinctively reached out to it as well."

"It was then," Powell recalls, "that the son-of-a-bitch bit me." Distracted with minimizing blood loss, the living fossil slowly swam away.

Coelacanths (Latimeria chalumnae) were thought to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. In 1938, the first specimen was collected by fishermen off the east coast of South Africa. Since that time, coelacanths have been found in other African locations, Madagascar, and in Indonesia. But to date, a coelacanth has never been documented in domestic waters.

Despite the chance cold-water encounter and difficulty in locating the living fossil, Powell believes the potential for the oily, odoriferous coelacanth to support a sustainable fishery is high. "I know all the arguments against fishing down the food chain," said Powell referring to the work of Dr. Daniel Pauly, "but I don't believe we have adequately explored fishing down the evolutionary chain."

Ichthyologists from the California Academy of Science, the Smithsonian, and Cascade Taxidermy could not be reached for comment.