Genetic Analysis Of Coelacanths

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

(always had an interest in these little guys...not sure why)

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/science/21obse.html
Published: June 21, 2005
...
Coelacanths made a big splash when the first one was hauled up in a
trawling net off the coast of South Africa nearly 70 years ago. The
strange deepwater creature with the large jaw and jointed fins was found
to be related to an ancient class of fish that disappeared from the fossil
record 60 million years ago.

Since then, most coelacanths have been found along the east coast of
Africa as far north as Kenya, with a concentration around the Comoro
Islands, northwest of Madagascar. Scientists have wondered whether these
rare fish, scattered across more than 2,500 miles, represent separate
populations or perhaps even subspecies.

A genetic analysis of 47 coelacanths by German researchers shows, however,
that the fish are probably all part of a single inbreeding population.

The study, by scientists at the University of Wrzburg and the Max-Planck
Institute for Behavioral Physiology, found almost no genetic variation
among the specimens. (By comparison, the researchers found a much greater
variation between these coelacanths and the only other known living
species, which was discovered in the late 1990's in Indonesia.)

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers suggest that this
population originated around the Comoros, and that farther-flung areas
were inhabited fairly recently. Coelacanths are not great ocean travelers,
so the fish probably dispersed slowly along the prevailing ocean currents,
which travel southward and northward from the Comoros. The more distant
fish either strayed individually (in which case they represent a
reproductive dead end) or in groups, forming reproducing subpopulations.
...