CubaPLUS Magazine

This rare fish with a cylindrical and elongated body, sometimes up to two meters long, covered with stony scales, still inhabits, although not abundantly, some rivers on the southern coast of western Cuba, although it found a perfect habitat in the extensive wetland of the Ciénaga de Zapata, the largest in the country, a restricted and protected area in the province of Matanzas.

The extraordinary thing about this relict species is that it is valued by science as a biological relic, a kind of evolutionary link between reptiles, fish and mammals, whose first companions on Earth ceased to exist a whopping few years ago, 27,000 centuries.

The mystery of its survival dazzles the applied scholars and equally the simple mortals aware that it is an order or family endemic to Cuba. There have been specimens in the southern part of the western region and Isle of Youth. Due to the reduction of their current life habitats, the danger of extinction that this family now faces is enormous, which could seem eternal to us.

Other semitropical regions of the Americas also count it among their values. It is estimated they were born in the Carboniferous stage of the Paleozoic era, coinciding with the time when the first reptiles were born. There are scientific theories that relate the body structure, endowed with skeletons, as the possible evolutionary link between fish, reptiles and mammals.

Called in Cuba manjuarí (Lepisosteustristoechus), name of Taíno or Arawak resonances, in some regions of the Antillean area it is known as alligator fish, due to the extreme hardness of its scales and the shape of its body. Not only is it a true living fossil, but it looks like one.

For that reason, their capture never attracted much to humans. It is known they were part of the diet of the first inhabitants of the Island, peaceful aborigines distributed in communities, found by the Spanish after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in Cuba, on October 27, 1492.

But that matter would be part of another story.