Detective McDavitt and the Curious Case of the Clown Wedgefish

Detective McDavitt and the Curious Case of the Clown Wedgefish

Source: motherjones

9/9/2023

Credit: Matthew McDavitt

Peter Kyne sits down at his desk to write a eulogy for a fish he’s never met. It’s summer 2019. No scientist has seen signs of the critically endangered Rhynchobatus cooki, or clown wedgefish, since a dead one turned up at a fish market in 1996.

Kyne, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia who studies wedgefish, has worked only with preserved specimens of the spotted sea creature. “This thing’s dust,” Kyne thinks, feeling defeated as he writes the somber news in a draft assessment of the global conservation status of wedgefish species for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.