On a recent morning at the Shedd Aquarium, kids in school uniforms formed a shrieking, overstimulated cluster near the Caribbean Reef tank, with its exotic day-glo fishes. They applauded for the penguins, gasped at the sharks and snakes, and made a bee-line for the dolphin show.
Meanwhile, Granddad, an Australian lungfish who was brought to the Shedd back in April 1933 to attract visitors during the World’s Fair, was being ignored. True, he performs no flashy party tricks in his corner tank. But he has the sweetest disposition anyone could ask for in a fish: He has worked for more than 70 years without taking a sick day, and, in addition to being a member of an order that is more than 370 million years old, he is, the Shedd says, “the oldest aquatic animal in a public aquarium in the world.”
Clearly, we live in a time in which age counts for little.
The staff at the Shedd, however, holds Granddad in high esteem.
“He’s an amazing animal,” said Roger Germann, the Shedd’s director of public relations, when I called to ask if I could meet the fish. He’s always a highlight of any tour, Germann added, and, of the 22,000 animals living at the aquarium, he’s one of only a handful to whom the staff has given a name.
A few weeks ago, we ran a story on what remains from the 1933 World’s Fair (Balbo Column, Lane Tech murals, etc.). A few days later we got a letter from Germann’s office informing us that we had neglected to mention the one fair relic that is actually still alive: Granddad.
Germann was right. He is an amazing fish: You just have to take the time to get to know him.
“That’s him; that’s Granddad,” said George Parsons, 42, director of aquarium collections, who gets to wear shorts to work. We were standing in a darkened gallery in front of a freshwater tank that also contained numerous rainbow fish, sideneck turtles and one big shiny monitor lizard (cousin of the gecko), all of which would be found in the natural riverbed habitat of the lungfish.
Granddad was sort of lounging on the bottom of the tank, unmoving, with four other lungfish.
He was a large drab-gray cylinder covered in bony scales and what looked like age spots, and he was substantially larger than the other lungfish, all of which have tiny button eyes, like a doll’s.
I mentioned to Parsons that Granddad looked like a log. (He was also acting like one, lying in a pile with the other lungfish, like an unlit campfire.)
“That’s precisely his camouflage,” Parsons said.
Still, I worried that a fish this listless would be hard to care for. How would you know if it felt bad, especially at his age?
Hand-feeding
Parsons was reassuring. Animals at the Shedd are fed by hand, in order to monitor changes in their eating habits and other behavior.
“We have one aquarist who’s in charge of this gallery, so he’s always making rounds. If we don’t see movement at all, we start to worry. We watch their gills, because respiration rate is important, making sure they’re not breathing too fast or breathing too slow.” Lazing around like this was actually a good sign.
“There he goes,” said Parsons, as Granddad showed some interest in heading toward the surface. We were both hoping to observe him in the act of breathing, his single most fascinating trick — as well as a phenomenon helpful to scientists studying the fish-to-amphibian link. “You’ll hear them expel and then breathe in, like a gasp,” Parsons said.
Granddad is an “obligate breather,” Parsons taught me. He has gills, but they’ve diminished so far that he can’t rely on them alone, so he surfaces every 20 to 25 minutes to fill his single lung, which evolved from a rudimentary “swim bladder.” (He also has little fins that look like the beginnings of amphibian legs, but he’s not related to the reviled snakehead or other fish that venture out of the water.)
“You can actually drown a lungfish,” Parsons said. “Which sounds kind of silly. But their lungs will fill up with water just like ours.”
Granddad didn’t make it to the top of the tank for his big breath this time. He seemed to get bored, and floated back down to the bottom. It was almost like he knew what we were waiting for. He was milking it.
“What’s he doing now?” I asked, as Granddad swept the tank floor a tiny bit with his head.
“Well, it looks like he’s foraging through the gravel a little bit. Our aquarist might have dropped some food in there, so he’s probably looking to see if he can find some leftovers.”
Hmmm. “What else?” I asked, as if surviving whatever killed the dinosaurs weren’t enough. This is what happens when you watch too much television. You get bored with miracles.
“This is essentially what lungfish do,” Parsons said. “They’re very passive. … They feel very comfortable here. They’re used to getting their allotment of food, so they don’t really have to fight or set up territory.”
But even if Parsons’ crew stopped hand-feeding the lungfish (which eat frozen fish, some romaine and other veggies), they’d still just lie there. “They’re ambush predators. When they’re hungry they’ll lie motionless like this, and along will come an unsuspecting fish to snap up.”
Mysterious type
Granddad turned out to be rather mysterious — “the strong, silent type,” as Parsons put it. In spite of the fact that he has lived at the Shedd for such a long time (“He’s been here through World War II, the Kennedy administration, Vietnam. … He’s been here through it all,” Parsons said), no one really knows the difference between Granddad when he’s sad and Granddad when he’s happy or frisky. Since the day he arrived from Australia in the Shedd’s specially equipped train car, the Nautilus, he has apparently never experienced any sort of illness or, it seems, a single emotional rough patch.
And, when you get right down to it, no one really knows for certain how old Granddad is. At 4 feet long and 25 pounds, he has doubled in size since arriving. “We’re just guessing that he was about 10 years old when he got here, but he could have been older,” said Parsons, who predicted that he’ll also outlive the other species in his tank.
Nor is it certain that Granddad is male rather than female.
“About five years ago,” Parsons said, “we started a breeding program. … “We did some ultrasounding on the five in here, and we’ve determined that definitely three of them are females, because we did see ovaries starting to develop.
“With Granddad, we didn’t see that, so we’re just assuming — and it may not be the case — that he’s male. We did some blood work, but it was inconclusive.”
And they also assume that if they can get the conditions right in the lungfish tank, that Granddad will be participatingWhich means it’s possible that Parsons and his crew will get to observe some entirely new behavior from an animal that has lived at the Shedd almost as long as it has existed.
After so many years of steady predictability, that sounded like exciting news to me. A couple of minutes later, though, the lungfish opened his mouth wide.
Is he snapping at one of the turtles? I asked. Is he going to eat a rainbow fish?
“He was probably taking a deeper breath,” Parsons said. “Maybe yawning. A yawn type situation. Fish yawn.”
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Fish tale
Name: Granddad
Species: Australian lungfish
Family: Ceratodontidae
Order: Ceratodontiformes
Gender: good question (see story)
Age: At least 71 years old (at the very least, since we think he was about 10 when he arrived at the Shedd Aquarium for the 1933 World’s Fair)
Favorite foods: frozen fish, romaine lettuce
Number of lungs: one
Tankmates: Australian rainbow fish, sideneck turtles, monitor lizard
Appearance: Despite his soft and slimy look, his scales are bony and platey, which is typical of many primitive fish. And unlike more advanced fish, which have pectoral fins closer to their sides, the lungfish have rudimentary limbs underneath, like a lizard.
