Mercenary Bob Denard and a group of 33 commandos invaded the Comoros once again in November 1995. They had stowed away in a freighter for more than a month, then with the help of locals were met by vans at the shore, launching a successful attack on the government and army barracks. Ironically, the purpose of the coup was to restore relatives and sympathizers of the former assassinated President Abdallah to power. The force took President Djohar captive, holding him for six days at the Kandani army compound. However, Denard failed to form a new government and was himself surrounded at Kandani by a French air/sea invasion of 1000 troops launched to counter his coup. Denard agreed to a negotiated surrender and was returned to France. President Djohar was dispatched by the French to the island of Reunion for "medical attention," and was never permitted by his own government to return to the Comoros as President. Thus Denard's coup was indirectly a partial success!

              Coincidentally, the Kandani army base was currently the repository for frozen coelacanth catches. In the midst of these military operations pieces of equipment went missing from the Coelacanth Rescue Station at Itsandra- the station had not been moved to the Coelacanth Hotel. These developments would spell the beginning of the end for the station, but news of them took a long time reaching me back in the U.S. In the meantime, I had produced two editions of a Coelacanth newsletter to generate interest and funding for the project.

   

               Early in 1996, I heard from Hans Fricke that a series of dives they performed in the Comoros in November '95, indicated that the number of coelacanths had declined from the year before. There had also been at least nine accidental by-catches during the year. (Mombassa had also made an unfavorable impression by drying to sell 2 dead fish to some of his colleagues!) Some of these catches had occurred near Itsandra and not been intercepted. The fish had been gaffed in the traditional manner. Radio announcements were orchestrated to avoid this. Later in the spring, a large coelacanth was brought up off Hahaya, the same village where we had seen the catch in '89. This fish also slipped through the intercept project, though it was attended and preserved by the Fotherby's who ran the Dive Shop at the Le Galawa resort hotel at the north end of the island. (This fish was later prepared by Robin Stobbs and put on view at the dive shop for several years, until it was moved to C.N.D.R.S. with funds made available by CRM of Dinofish.com.)

          Clearly, I would need better funding for the intercept project. I attended an Explorers Club sponsored conference in Philadelphia, on fund raising for research projects. We were told that it was essential to have web sites for such projects. A web site? Up to then, I had assiduously avoided the internet for fear it would take over my life- a fear that would prove prophetic! Working with the famous "Dummies" books,I set about creating a coelacanth website that would contain a subtle appeal for funding. In the beginning, I used only my own photos and drawings, but eventually contributing "coelaphiles" would emerge from around the world supplying materials and a fascinating ongoing dialogue about the fish. One problem at start up was what to call the site. The domain name "coelacanth.com" was already taken by an engineering firm, featuring, I presume, long-lived designs. Then too, there was the problem of spelling "coelacanth," which sometimes stumped even professional academics. How would people find the site? I knew little about search engines at the time. So it was that I coined the rather inappropriate domain name "Dinofish.com," combining dinosaur and fish into an easy to recall moniker. The site launched in the spring of '96, got a listing on Yahoo, and was soon pulling about fifteen hits per day which seemed exciting at the time. It was far better than the few people requesting the newsletter. (The number now fluctuates between 200 and 600 hits per day with spikes in the thousands when coelacanth news breaks and sites such as CNN's link on.)

          In November '96, tragedy struck in the Comoros. A hijacked commercial Boeing 767 with 175 passengers on board, ran out of fuel near the Comoros, and made a hard ditch in the sea at the North end of Grand Comoro, within a kilometer of the South African run Galawa Beach resort hotel. During the ditch- caught on video by vacationing South African honeymooners- one wing caught the sea and the fuselage flipped laterally. More than one hundred died, their bodies later hauled ashore by private craft from the resort. The corpses lined the beach, death in short sleeved shirts and sandals. At least 57 survived, including four Americans. The survivors were put up at local hotels - including Le Coelacanth- on their surprise visit to the Comoros.

          By the beginning of 1997, communications from Mombassa had become rather vague. I heard from him, but I couldn't get a proper status report on the resus station. Then in April of that year, I received a call from Shakur Aboud. Mombassa was dead. He had been killed a few days before when a Bashe he was driving was struck by another vehicle- ironically a car he had himself once driven for the US Embassy. Mombassa and I were the same age. He left the planet and the world of the coelacanth without a satisfactory personal resolution to either. But as events would unfold it was not clear how much he really cared. I think he was one of those better designed to charm the moment than climb the mountain. I was shocked. What to do now?

      I planned an expedition for the fall of '97, to overhaul and revitalize the resus unit. There would be at least three new components: An instructional T shirt for fishermen, that showed them how to care for a caught coelacanth -i.e. not to gaff it!- and move it safely to the resus unit; new custom built water holding transporter sacks, and a robotic coelacanth to place in the resus tank as an inspiration.

     I produced the T shirt design on my lap top, had them produced, and sent them to the Comoros, where after much difficulty, they were released by customs to Said Ahamada. Said was a young Comoran from the south of Grand Comoro, interested in coelacanths and conservation, who had assisted the Fricke efforts, and been recommended to me by Robin Stobbs. I designed the transporter sacks and had them produced by a local awning company. Their purpose was to keep the fish submerged in a small amount of water at all times as it was moved to the resus tank. Because of the difficulty sending the shirts, I held them back to bring over personally. The robotic coelacanth was the most creative of the three items. I built it around an oscillating water sprinkler so it could work underwater, animated by the return flow from the water pump in the resus tank. Wooden armatures to work the fins in realistic alternating (pectoral fin/ pelvic fin) motions were attached to the oscillating core of the sprinkler, and the whole covered in artificial "fish skin," covered by thousands of synthetic hand cut scales. I called the creature "Nemo" (long before the animated Disney film). All the elements for the trip were ready. Nemo had only to be tested in a swimming pool.

          

         Robin Stobbs went to the Comoros in the summer of '97 to prepare the Hahaya fish for the Galawa dive shop. He sent back a startling report: the Itsandra resus no longer existed! The tent had been gone for several months- pre-dating the demise of Mombassa, and a house was being built in place of the tank. The '97 expedition was canceled. Back to square one.

         I was concerned about Hans Fricke's report that the numbers of coelacanths was on the decline. This was bad news no matter how you looked at it. Installing new F.A.D.S. was not practical. What to do? Hundreds of fresh minds were logging onto Dinofish.com. Why not try to tap into them? I decided to present a web site contest. There would be a $500 reward. It was called "Save the Coelacanth." The purpose was to solicit ideas for novel ways to conserve the fish. Something might turn up than none of us had thought about. Many of the ideas such as cloning, fish farms, and artificial reefs were good, but not immediately practical. Then one day in the early winter of '98, came a suggestion that was just right. It took a minute to understand. The email was from Ray Waldner, a biologist in Florida. He detailed a technique used to release deep reef fish back to the bottom. This is important, because a fish which has been brought to the surface from some depth, fighting a hook and line, might not have the energy to get back down to its cold water habitat. In the case of the coelacanth, brought up from 700ft, with its fat filled swim bladder, pressure change might not be the killer, but fatigue might be. Here's how Ray's technique works: With the fish on the surface, you place a barb less hook in the fish's mouth upside down, that is with the shank and eye pointed down. Attached to the eye is a short string tied to a weight. To the curve of the hook, you attached your fishing line. Now you release the fish. The weight pulling on the hook brings it down to the bottom with no exertion on the fish's part. All the time you're paying out your fishing line attached to the curve of the hook. When you sense the fish is on the bottom, that is when your line stops paying out, you give a tug on the line removing the hook from the fish's mouth, freeing it on the bottom. You then reel up the rig which you can reuse. Ingenious!

          The question was how to make this technique of any use in the Comoros, where the coelacanths were caught so occasionally and by any given fisherman. I already knew that the fisherman liked t shirts- which were worn almost constantly in the warm climate. The logical option was to pack the release rigs onto the backs of hundreds of t shirts and send them to the fishermen in the Comoros. This is what we did, beginning in the spring of '98. We sewed Zip Lock bags to the backs of the shirts. Each bag contained a barb less hook attached to a plastic bag. The fishermen could add a couple of his sinker stones- carried in his outrigger canoe on each outing- to the plastic bag to make a weight. The shirts were also printed with diagrammatic instructions showing how to release the fish. This T shirt dubbed the Deep Release Kit shirt or DRK was also made available for sale on Dinofish.com (without the kit) to help support the effort. Almost a thousand have been sold to supporters in dozens of countries and I have dubbed it: "The shirt heard round the world." Later, I redesigned the release rig to fit into a plastic change purse. This unit, The DRK II, replaced the deep release shirt as it was far less expensive to produce and ship. I have no confirmed report of the rigs actually being used to release a coelacanth, but the Deep Release t shirts and DRK II's were accompanied by an educational effort that did much to raise local awareness of the coelacanth's value and the plight of the accidental by-catches. In this way, I compensated for the loss of the Itsandra resus station and an important part of its purpose. And I had yet to return to the Comoros.

          One interesting feature of managing Dinofish.com consisted of reports I received of coelacanths in unexpected places. True some were from very unlikely places like Alaska and Argentina. But others were more promising, such as a reported man-fish from the Mediterranean. Diana and I had followed reports from Robin Stobbs in 1994, when we detoured from the Comoros to look for coelacanths in Madagascar. The closest we came was a shaman in the northeast town of Manampona, who claimed he had once caught one that tried to "fly." But the Madagascar coelacanth was confirmed in reports of catches off the southwest village of Tulear beginning in 1995. To date four coelacanths have been netted. These fish were identified as the same species as the Comoran coelacanths and some experts considered them to be strays, caught in the currents and deposited along the coast of Madagascar.

           In '96 I received several communications from coelacanth researcher Michel Raynal, who was fascinated by the idea of out of place coelacanths. He had heard from an ichthyologist at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, that a traveling French fisheries consultant had spotted a coelacanth in an Indonesian fishing village some years before. I asked for more information but none was forth coming. This was the harbinger of an exciting development in the coelacanth world.

           In the summer of '97, Berkeley post doctoral student Mark Erdmann was in Manado, North Sulawezi Indonesia with his new wife, Arnaz, looking for a residence to use for his upcoming research on shrimps. In the market they saw a man with an odd fish that he recognized as a coelacanth. Mark didn't want to hassle the man but his wife insisted that they get a photograph. The two assumed that Indonesia was simply part of the coelacanth's range and back in the states they posted the picture on their honeymoon website. The picture came to the attention of Eugene Balon and a colleague at Guelph University in Ontario. Balon, one of the founders of the by now defunct C.C.C. contacted Erdmann and advised him to withdraw the picture so that the find, an important scientific discovery, could be properly exploited. The National Geographic Society was contacted. It was decided that Erdmann would lay low until another catch turned up to validate the find and be covered by the NGS. Back in Sulawesi, Erdmann alerted local fishermen and began his regular research. At Berkeley, his research supervisor, Roy Caldwell, nervously checked in on dinofish.com to be sure the secret had not leaked out. It hadn't. Most of the "coelacanth community" was kept in the dark for the better part of a year. On July 30th, in the summer of '98, a coelacanth was caught in a shark net off Manado and delivered to Erdmann while still alive. Mark and Arnaz moved it through the water in the usual vain effort to keep it alive. The fish was preserved on ice and the NGS alerted. NGS and the magazine Nature, agreed that a press embargo be imposed to coordinate maximum hype for the announcement. The day before the news was to be released, I received a courtesy email form Roy Caldwell advising me to watch for exciting news. This came on Sept 24th, with a cover picture of the fish on Nature Magazine. News clips appeared around the world. Dinofish.com had six thousand hits in one 24 hour period. The astounding thing is that Sulawesi is 10,000 kilometers from the Comoros with no apparent current interactions. Eventually, the Jago submersible and Frick Dive Team investigated the Indonesian coelacanths. They only found two. Erdmann maintained that they didn't look in the right place, and Fricke maintained that the submarine structure was wrong and the currents were too strong for coelacanths to live in that area. He concluded they were strays from somewhere else, perhaps the Philippines. But both agreed, based on DNA tests, that the Indonesian coelacanth was a different species. Another team of investigators jumped the gun on Mark Erdmann, rushing out a paper that entitled them to name the fish: Latimeria menadoensis. As Japan's Toba aquarium came snooping around, Erdmann put in place a sound conservation program, banning shark net fishing in the area. One consequence of this was that for some years no more Indonesian coelacanths were caught or observed.

          Dinofish.com participated more directly in another out of place coelacanth discovery. In May '01, I received an anxious email from the friend of a fisherman in Malindi, Kenya far north of the coelacanth catch off Maputo, Mozambique in '90. They had trawled a coelacanth. It was not a hoax they said and asked for advice. I gave them a little too much, I said to freeze the fish, not to expect money, told them to contact Kenya Wildlife, and said the fish would wind up famous at the Nairobi Museum. All this happened but not right away. Without the money incentive, they let the fish languish frozen and it was not rediscovered for some months when it was brought to the attention of the President of Kenya. The fish is now at the Nairobi Museum- with much fanfare. The possibility of coelacanths up and down the East African coast- an early supposition of JLB Smith's- was now very real.

           The website and its conservation program were work, but fun and rewarding. Now, after six years, it was time to return to the field.  It was finally 2000, the new millennium had arrived...