So. What does prehistoric deepwater seafish TASTE like?
Since it’s from the ocean, it shouldn’t have a terribly oily flesh. But damn, coelacanths LOOK oily, don’t they?
Does one roast coelacanth? Filet and grill it? Stuff it whole? Tartar sauce or cocktail sauce?
Sorry not to post a link, but this is in reference to the new column (not yet onsite), which appeared in yesterday’s NEW YORK PRESS, mentioning scientists who found a coelacanth for sale by the pound in a tropical fish market.
“Check your next tuna melt,” Cecil wrote, provoking a wide grin and appreciative chuckle from Your Correspondent.
The coelacanth is a member of the crossopterygian group of fish that were the ancestors of the amphibians. So maybe they taste something like frog (which I hear is similar to chicken). A coelacanth fillet might go well with some thawed out mastodon. Prehistoric surf and turf.
Elmer J. Fudd,
Millionaire.
I own a mansion and a yacht.
It’s actually a little-know fact that word coulibiac (from the Russian kulibiac) has its origins in coelacanth (kulibiac = coleacanth baked), and is one of the few dishes that were enjoyed by prehistoric man. Uke, I believe you have a recipe for that?
No recipe, but in reference to Cecils’ answer, I once saw a Coelecanth in a pet store in San Antonio in 1976; A rather ugly specimen with lobed fins and heavy scales.
VB
I could never eat a mouse raw…their little feet are probably real cold going down. :rolleyes:
A couple of years ago, one of the scientific exploration programs on TLC or Discovery featured amazing film of living coelacanths taken by the research submersible Jago. As I recall, they were swimming vertically alongside an underwater cliff. They were coming up to feed at night several hundered feet below the surface from their customary daytime level of 600 feet or so. It was truly amazing. More info available at http://www.dinofish.com/. By the way, the “fossil fish” shows up on South African gold coins and on stamps of South Africa, Madagascar and others.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.—G.C. Lichtenberg
I’m glad Cecil made fun of the “more than ten thousand years ago” line in that dumb commercial. It always grates on me when I hear it. It’s like old episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, where some character or another would refer to another planet or star being “more than a million miles” from Earth.
Personally, I hate the VW commercial because it feels the need to explain the joke. It would be a charming spot if they just left the Coelecanth reference out there for those of us (and I thought that would be most people) who have heard of it
The problem with that is there would be too many people calling VW asking why their VW didn’t come with the coelecanth, as advertised. “I don’t care what it is, I want mine. Your commercial said I’d get one. Right next to the full-sized spare tire.”
Maybe the scriptwriter didn’t screw up. Maybe he or she figured that a layperson, like the mechanic in the commercial, would have only a vague recollection of the coelacanth story from a brief television news segment about its discovery. For someone other than a scientist (and maybe then only a marine biologist), it’s not only to be expected but probably SUFFICIENT for daily living that they’d remember the story as “sea creature called a cee-la-canth, thought to be extinct for umpety-umpth years, found alive off Madagascar” rather than committing all the details to memory. (Economy of effort, saving memory space, and all that. See the passage in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes says that he keeps only the useful information in his head and has books to refer to for the rest if and when he needs it.)
So maybe the scriptwriter, or the ad agency, or whoever, thought that it would sound more credible for a mechanic to say “over ten thousand years ago,” and a lot LESS credible for him to come up with the correct “65 million years ago”.
People who can find links when Yahoo and such can’t: Can anyone find some background on a couple-of-years-old memory of reading that (a) coelacanths were becoming rare in the Comoro-Madagascar area where they had been discovered back in 1938 and (b) another area where they lived had been found somewhere in the seas off the Indonesian islands?
Er, uh, Poly… It’s, uhm, in Cecil’s column: A scientist and his wife were walking through an Indonesian fish market where they saw and photographed a fresh-caught coelacanth. Then Cecil says:
This statement is followed by the fish-market story Cecil related. (BTW, the scientist in question is Dr. Mark Erdmann.) Further down in that article, we see this:
In other words, the common fishermen of Indonesia had known about the coelacanth long enough to name the ugly thing. It’s just scientists who didn’t know they lived near Indonesia too.
And to answer something that Uke asked so long ago:
Coelacanths are damn oily. They keep themselves neutrally bouyant by building up a store of oils and fats in their bodies rather than use a gas-filled swin bladder. Biochemically, they seem more similar to sharks than to ray-finned fish.
It seems to me that the discovery of the Indonesian population may indicate that they are much more plentiful than we had thought. If anyone can procure the funding, I will volunteer my time to go fishing around steep-sided islands across the entire northern arc of the Indian Ocean…
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
Ok now this coelacanth thing is one hot topic. We got this thread here and this one http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000479.html there, and this one http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000488.html over there. I asked how it might taste in one of those. I knew somebody would say "sorta like chicken’, everything tastes like chicken. But what does chicken taste like? Supose you never had chicken or any fowl, then you ate some what would you compare it too? Alligator? Or like a plecostemus, that’s the ugly sucker aquarium fish, Jill, tho I don’t think I spelled it right.
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
Yeah, but I was trying to be polite about it. You caught my Constitutional error over in the “Homophobic Bigots” thread in the Pit and I thought I’d return the favor.
