Return to index

Indonesian fish stories

In late February, Naylor, accompanied by graduate students Andrés Lopez and Olivier Fedrigo and photographer Matt Doty, traveled to the tiny northern Indonesian island of Bunaken, seeking samples from 15 exotic deepwater sharks.

Local fishermen, who were helping Naylor catch sharks to study, set 60 foot by 300 foot nets at about 600 feet beneath the surface. "In the mornings, we found the nets had been moved around by the currents, then dragged across the coral reef and shredded.

"On three separate occasions, the net had a hole in it that you could’ve flown an airplane through," Naylor said.

The displaced nets captured some shallow water sharks "that are interesting for population studies, but they weren’t the rare deepwater kinds we were looking for," Naylor said.

"It was basically bad luck. We just happened to have the current at the time we were there," he said. "It’s like that. That’s why it’s called fishing, I guess."

He brought 50 T-shirts with illustrations of the 15 sharks he wanted most. Like the FBI posters that decorate post office bulletin boards, Naylor’s T-shirts asked, "Pernahkan anda melihat hiu-hiu ini?" (Have you seen any of these sharks?)

"The fishermen loved the T-shirts. About 40 people on the tiny island of Bunaken are running around with our T-shirts on," Naylor chuckled.

Naylor left the fishermen with a supply of sample tubes and detailed instructions on how to collect and mail tissue samples. "If they happen to come across those sharks, they’ll be more likely to follow through."

Sharks are good subjects for his evolutionary research because they’re physically diverse and because they shed a lot of teeth onto the ocean floor. "A shark sheds about 20,000 teeth over its lifetime. As new teeth come in, the old ones sink to the sediment at the bottom of the ocean. The teeth are fossilized ‘labels of chronology’ that can be collected," Naylor said.

"We can reconstruct the evolutionary history of modern sharks from their DNA sequences. We also can assess the timing of evolutionary events from their continuous record of fossil teeth."

By comparing DNA, Naylor intends to identify which genes are responsible for the variations found in different species.

They went fishing.

At one site, they found some climbing gobies behind a waterfall. The climbing gobi is a fish, about 1.5 centimeters long, with pelvic fins that are modified into a sucker. The little fish was clambering around the vertical rock face behind the waterfall, Naylor said.

They also stopped at a volcanic lake. "It’s an amazing place, a water-filled caldera ringed with steaming geothermal vents. A mist hung over the entire lake, which was bright green from the sulfur. We got there about a half hour before sunset, so the light was really eerie," Naylor said.

As the group examined the steam vents, they noticed odd-looking structures in the middle of the lake. "Our Indonesian guide said the structures held vegetation for attracting fish," Naylor said. "We said, ‘This is a volcanic lake, it’s bright green from all the sulfur – fish can’t possibly live here.’"

Then they noticed an old man in a dugout canoe who said he was fishing.

"We climbed into his old dugout canoe and set out across the lake. I felt like something out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, with the mist rising over the green water and the craggy fisherman paddling the rickety canoe," Naylor said.

"When we reached the odd structure, the fisherman used a little hand net to catch some of these fish. We had a look at them, thinking we might be discovering something," Naylor said. "But, they weren’t even fish. They were dragonfly larvae!"

We looked at the various sharks, skates and rays and collected some samples," Naylor said. "When you offer $2, take a piece of shark meat smaller than a pea, put it in a little tube and return the animal to the fishermen, they think you’re crazy."