Coelacanth Conservation Council

Abstract

Winston Churchill once called a backbencher, who remained silent for nearly twenty years in the British House of Lords and then got up to make a great speech, ‘that coelacanth of a man’. Since then the coelacanth has become a metanym for someone or something that rises up from the past with a great message to tell. True to form, the Coelacanth Conservation Council (CCC) newsletter has performed the same phoenix-like transformation; after being moribund for five years, while the editor was employed at a busy commercial aquarium in Cape Town, the newsletter has responded with alacrity to the discovery of coelacanths in Indonesia and will resume its services to coelacanthophiles worldwide.

Since the last newsletter was published in December 1993, the world has changed dramatically, especially with respect to information technology. Information on the coelacanth (and every other imaginable topic) is now readily available on the internet; the fun of establishing the first coelacanth internet site (http://www.dinofish.com) is described by Jerry Hamlin in this newsletter. We nevertheless thought that the CCC newsletter provides a unique, hardcopy service by updating the official coelacanth inventory and bibliography and by publishing interesting accounts of recent developments in coelacanth research and conservation. So we are resuming regular publication, thanks to ‘raja laut’. In the future, the sequence of coelacanth specimens in the inventory of specimens will not be strictly chronological as information is often received on specimens long after they were caught; we nevertheless consider it worth recording all the specimens that come to our attention, in the order that they are reported to us.