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Historical past of San Francisco’s Oldest Aquarium Fish

WITHEcological facilities offer people the rare opportunity to see some of the most unique and often endangered wildlife in the world. Large exhibits that showcase charismatic mammals – reticulated giraffes, African elephants, jaguars, great apes, whales (although luckily this is changing), etc. – are usually the fauna we synonymous with these wildlife parks. But … what if I told you that San Francisco’s very own California Academy of Sciences is home to not only the city’s oldest aquarium fish, but probably the entire country?

Meet Methusalah: the Australian lungfish over 90 years old that came to San Francisco on a steamer from Queensland, Australia in 1938.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle published a glorious profile on the magnetic fish that actually uses both its primitive lungs and gills to store oxygen. (As the newspaper noted, the name “Methuselah” is a Biblical reference to Noah’s grandfather, who lived to be 969; the fish is now four feet long and weighs about 40 pounds, and is likely to keep growing [as most fish do the rest of their lives; they’re what we call animals without “predetermined growth” in biology]; she likes fruit snacks and abdominal massages.)

And what is equally fascinating about Methusalah’s own San Francisco story is the evolutionary biology of the species to which it belongs.

Australian lungfish – also known as “Queensland lungfish” due to their naturally occurring distribution in slow-flowing basins and river systems in southeast Queensland – are among the oldest living fish species known to science, with a few examples such as Methusalah living 90 or more Years. It is believed that the longest-lived Australian lungfish must be a centenarian. (Fuck our blue zones, am I right?)

They also belong to only one of six living lungfish species in the world and are the only surviving member of the genus Neoceratodontidae. Four species of the genus Protopterus (animals of the family Protopteridae) occur in Africa; one species, Lepidosiren paradoxa (the only species in the Lepidosirenidae family) occurs in South America; The Australian lungfish is the only species in the Ceratodontidae family – and is also one of the stockiest of all known lungfish.

How did these fish get their primitive lung system, which is almost identical in function and structure to that of amphibians? They have got rid of their swim bladder, which is why lungfish have pectoral and ventral fins and a single unpaired caudal fin in place of the dorsal fin, which look slightly nifty and mirror rudimentary limbs.

Because, yes: Lungfish are just as well suited to migrating through swampy wetlands as they are to gliding through the shallow, slow-moving aquatic habitats in which they can be found.

It is not known exactly how old the species itself is. However, fossil records of examples from this group have been dated back 380 million years, to about the time the higher vertebrate classes appeared on the planet – a full 170 million years before the first mammals are believed to have migrated. In addition, lungfish fossils have almost identical anatomies to those found today, suggesting that they have existed largely unchanged for well over 100 million years.

Lungfish are not just primitive; They are among the oldest living vertebrates on this space rock.

But because humans are assholes, many of the lungfish species still alive, including the Australian lungfish, are “threatened” according to reports from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). According to the IUCN, some are even “endangered”, such as the Australian lungfish. All of them are currently facing human-made habitat loss and increasing threats to their riparian areas due to the climate crisis.

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Next time you’re looking for some rainy day activity, pay a visit to Methusalah. And implore whatever higher power you choose to honor that human greed does not deprive future generations of the chance to see members of their species via belly-stroking.

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