Friends of the Red Handfish: a dive into the archive

As part of the Ultramarine project we are republishing some paid content for free. This long read was originally published in issue 101 of Cosmos print magazine, in December 2023. You can read more amazing long reads if you subscribe now.

When your neighbour is struggling, the community rallies around them – even if that neighbour is a fish. Keely Jobe’s small Tasmanian town shares its shores with the endangered red handfish. By telling the story of her involvement in local conservation efforts, Jobe considers how the community and scientists are both vital to saving at-risk species.

The Friends of the Red Handfish (FORH) organise their first community information session for a Monday night. It’s a modest affair, held in a Besser-block community hall with fluorescent bar lighting and teal nylon seats. There’s tea and biscuits, cheese and crackers, and a raffle with donated prizes. But an hour before the event is set to start, the weather arrives. Furious winds and drenching rains barrel in sideways. It’s the kind of night for staying in bed and watching Netflix, not for sitting in a community hall listening to a science lecture on a fish.

Setting up her PowerPoint, our special guest Dr Jemina Stuart-Smith only laughs. She’s a marine biologist at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), and coordinator of the Handfish Conservation Project. “If no one shows, at least we’ll have the pick of the biscuits,” she says.

Pam, a member of FORH, turns to me as we unstack the chairs. “If we get 10 people I’ll be surprised,” she mumbles.

But 45 minutes before it’s due to start, the first family arrives, followed by a steady stream of locals. By 7pm, the carpark is full, we’ve run out of chairs and it’s standing room only. Despite the weather, despite the school night, half the community have turned up to hear about the red handfish.

Soon after I moved to the small coastal community in which I live, my neighbour Tracey invited me to join Friends of the Red Handfish. I was wrapped in a towel after a mid-summer snorkel and Tracey was busy in the garden. She told me about a ­colony of this critically endangered fish that inhabited a patch of the shallow rocky reef bordering our suburb. “You probably just swam over them,” she said.

FORH had been founded a few years before when Tracey and her partner Siobhan started making scones and tea for the IMAS divers in return for handfish gossip. They met Jemina, a regular diver keen for community engagement. Tracey told me that FORH was gathering members with the aim of gently spreading community support for our elusive aquatic neighbours.

I had heard of the red handfish. I knew their numbers were drastically low and the likelihood of extinction alarmingly high. To have them settled in waters I could see from my living room felt like a gift, a great privilege. It also reminded me that my local patch was not only unique and complex but already well established. If I wanted to call this place home, if I wanted to consider the non-human lives that had settled in the area before me, I had some learning to do.

The first FORH meeting I attend is held in Pam’s living room. A dozen of us gather around a table spread with an obscene amount of baked goods, and everyone holds a cup of tea. Pam’s greyhound Russell oversees proceedings. Some actions are already in the planning, from putting up signage at the boat ramps to hosting a morning tea for funding bodies to having a handfish sculpture placed at the suburb’s entrance. Marley, our youngest member at nine years of age, presents a brilliant drawing of a handfish and it’s decided this will be the mascot.

The community information session is the next big thing on the menu. If the species is to survive in our area, it will need the support of informed, protective human neighbours.

Local elder Aunty Colleen Mundy/minungkana has plenty of ideas to get feet in the door. “What about a raffle?” she offers. “What about a meat tray? Or a bottle of wine?”

“And how many people are we catering for?” Markus asks. “Should we say 40?”

“The local supermarket is donating a cheese platter,” Pam informs us. “So that’ll bring the costs down.”

Jemina is also there, updating us on the research. There are certain details the scientists are still unsure of, like how to tell the difference between the males and females of the species, how to recognise mating behaviour or environmental triggers, and why the fish are (only just) surviving in this particular spot. The data is hard to come by because there are so few individuals left. This is the first time I learn there are only seven fish in our local colony, which stuns me. I knew they were endangered, but SEVEN!?

The red handfish (Thymichthys politus) is an angler fish endemic to the south-east waters of Tasmania. They are demersal, meaning they live largely on the seabed, and they have no swim bladder, relying instead on agile pectoral fins to grip and move themselves about, essentially walking on the ocean’s floor. Despite this quirky trait, handfish barely move and prefer the world, food included, to come to them. In fact, over the course of a lifetime – thought to be around five years – red handfish might travel only a few metres from where they hatched. This stagnant existence might seem like an obstacle to evolutionary fitness, but the red handfish has a surprisingly long lineage, dating back to the Eocene Period, 56 to 33 million years ago.

Today, due to a raft of interconnecting threats, these fish have a grim outlook. Habitat loss due to warming waters, an increase in native sea urchins, residential run-off, overharvesting of lobsters, and in-shore anchor dragging have reduced and fragmented the population. Once relatively common, they are now restricted to only two sites in Frederick Henry Bay, about a half-hour’s drive east of Hobart, with the total wild population sitting at roughly one hundred individuals. The smaller colony is located where I live.

But there is hope. While most of these threats are caused by human interference, when it comes to the survival of the red handfish, human engagement is now the most effective method of conservation. Beyond subsurface interventions such as urchin culls, lobster reintroduction and habitat restoration, researchers like Jemina can only do so much. Care at a practical level involves a change in recreational fishing behaviours, in boating behaviours and, hopefully, in broad community support for a future in-shore marine park, which will do wonders for habitat restoration. These are not small requests in an isolated coastal community where differing opinions are rife regarding how the water should be used. Changing attitudes will take time and patience.

“The community has to want it,” Jemina says. “They’re the deciding factor regarding the project’s success.”

Fortunately, community support is growing. Xavia, one of FORH’s younger members at 11 years of age, is thrilled to live so close to the species. “Knowing that Tasmania is the only place you’ll find these creatures, I just think we’re the luckiest people to live right beside them,” she says.

Marley is more visionary in his hopes for the species, predicting a population boost of “thousands and thousands”. It might be the fragility of the colony that brings FORH together, or maybe we imagine a brighter future for the species and its habitat. We’re a motley crew with not much more than coastal suburbia in common, but the red handfish is something we all agree on.

“I have never seen a handfish, despite them living within a hundred metres of our front veranda,” Siobhan says. “But I don’t need to see them to care about them or love them. They are symbols of the struggle many of us face in life. They are champions of survival and can teach us about resilience. I will always have their back.”

Pam agrees. “I have always felt a huge weight of sadness that we, as human beings, brought about the demise of the thylacine,” she says. “I could not stand by and let the same thing happen in my community. Red handfish survival is linked to all our survival.”

When the red handfish captive breeding program opens its facility, Jemina invites a few members of FORH to the event. She wants us to see in person what our efforts are going towards. Pam, Aunty Colleen and I drive over to represent the group and find the facility in a leafy coastal suburb on the outskirts of Hobart, tucked between a football oval and a bowls club. The centre is packed with scientists, students, philanthropists and higher-ups at the university. We feel a little out of place, but Jemina introduces us as if we’re honoured guests.

The captive red handfish are kept in a dimly lit storage cupboard the size of a pantry; more than 100 are scattered between roughly 20 tanks. The fish are fed with locally sourced amphipods and monitored seven days a week. Every day the tanks are cleaned, the water quality and temperature checked. There are more fish in these tanks than can be found in the wild – they are the hope of the species’ survival. Some of their kin have already been released at sites with extant wild populations. When they come of age and size, this group is set to join them.

I can’t stop staring at the fish. I am totally smitten.

“They’re beautiful,” Aunty Colleen whispers.

They’re bright vermilion or light pink with red mottling, and sport wicked peachy mohawks, orange fins, bright blue eyes. Above their heads, a fluffball flamboyantly dangles. Their lips, invariably pulled down in a pout, are so plump it’s as if they’re filled with Botox. Some of the fish are fully grown, around the length of an adult’s thumb. Others are babies and no bigger than a fingernail. Settled on the bottom of the tanks, the fish are so still they could easily be mistaken for decoys or even bath toys. But every now and then one will shift, open its large, dexterous pectoral fins and crawl forward as if on primate hands.

What strikes me about this backroom set-up is its modesty. While the aims and ambitions of the sciences are generally lofty and their findings invariably complex, the day-to-day ­running often sits somewhere between the predictable and the mundane. This is the case with the captive breeding program run by Dr Andrew Trotter and his small team. Someone has to feed the fish, so someone has to go out and catch the tiny crustaceans they eat. Someone has to clean the tanks, get rid of the fish poo, check the PH levels, check the temperature. This is the unseen side of science and conservation. It is not elegant or even particularly intellectual. It’s just labour.

After the information night has ended, Jemina, Pam and I have a quick debrief over the cheese platter. Over 50 names have been added to the FORH email list. We’re a bit stunned by the range of attendees: young families, retirees, old locals and new locals, weekenders, recreational fishermen, aquaculture workers and local councillors. More importantly, we’re bowled over by the response from community, by the enthusiasm and pride for the place where we live.

Jemina’s talk – which included a slideshow of local marine species, an introduction to the red handfish and its conservation status, and a description of the role community can play in saving it – was met with rapt attention, murmurs of recognition and agreement. When she was done, the questions came thick and fast, and the meeting ran over by half an hour.

Some locals had no queries, wanting simply to relay their fears. They bemoaned the changing coastal habitat, noting the destruction they’d witnessed. Some recalled a time when throwing a line out meant reeling in dinner. Encouragingly, there was unanimous appetite for improving the local marine environment.

I can see Jemina is relieved by the response. Researchers rely on local support and local voices to advocate for their findings and implement their ideas. This grassroots approach, though possibly daunting to researchers, makes total sense, because in a community whose identity and daily activity is directly linked to the sea surrounding it, there’s little chance an outsider, however well informed, will hold as much sway as a local voice.

And who better to refuse a species’ extinction than its community? Who better to make room for the crucial work of researchers, while offering local environmental and cultural knowledge, than those who live in the area? Who better to get other locals on board than their neighbours?

When the hope of an entire species is gathered in a single converted storage room the size of a walk-in wardrobe, when they’re fed seven days a week with food gathered by hand from nearby bodies of water, it leaves the door open for all kinds of everyday acts of conservation. It means anyone can, and should, get involved. Sometimes conservation is making scones and tea for divers. Sometimes conservation is a letterbox drop, or a donated cheese platter. Sometimes it’s booking the local community hall and making sure the percolator is full and the biccies are stocked. Sometimes conservation is putting the chairs out. And anyone can do that.