MANADO (Indonesia): Two months ago Indonesian fisherman Justinus Lahama caught a fish so exceptional that an international team of scientists rushed here to investigate.

French experts equipped with sonar and GPS asked Lahama to reconstruct, in his dugout canoe, exactly what it was he did that enabled him to catch a rare coelacanth fish, an awkward-swimming species among the world’s oldest.

Coelacanths, closely related to lungfish, usually live at depths of 200-1,000 metres. They can grow up to two metres in length and weigh as much as 91 kilograms.. Lahama’s catch, 1.3 metres long and weighing 50 kilograms was only the second ever captured alive in Asia. The first was caught in 1998, also off Manado.

That catch astonished ichtyologists, who until then had been convinced that the last coelacanths were found only off eastern Africa, mainly in the Commoros archipelago. They had been thought to have died out around the time dinosaurs became extinct, until one was found there in 1938.

Their fossil records date back more than 360 million years and suggest that the fish has changed little over that period.

Lahama, who had never even heard of the fish, initially thought of selling his white-spotted catch. “Considering his weight, I said to myself, this will fetch a good price.” Returning to port, he showed it off to the most senior fisherman, who became alarmed.

“It is a fish which has legs -- it should be given back to the water. It will bring us misfortune,” he told him. But the unsuperstitious Lahama decided to keep it. After spending 30 minutes out of water, the fish, still alive, was placed in a netted pool in front of a restaurant at the edge of the sea. It survived for 17 hours.—AFP