Oceanic oddities

It's 2019.  We've explored the world, right? Fear not, there is some fun to be had in poking under the sea.  

The common claim that 95% or so of the ocean is unexplored is a distortion. According to the blog Deepsea News, this is the percentage of the ocean floor not yet seen by humans or cameras. Still, in 1.39 billion cubic kilometers of ocean, a lot of things can be hiding.

Two British naturalists, Michael J. Nicoll and E.G.B. Meade-Waldo, might have had the weirdest encounter on record in December 1905. They were experienced scientists, best known for their work in ornithology but with the wide interests and expertise common for naturalists in those days. Both were Fellows of the Zoological Society of London.

The encounter came during a research cruise aboard the yacht Valhalla. At 10:15 AM, the yacht was off the coast of Brazil, fifteen miles east of the mouth of the Parahiba River. As the two naturalists looked out over the ocean, Nicoll saw something unusual. He asked Meade-Waldo, "Is that the fin of a great fish?"

Meade-Waldo looked and saw a fin he described as "dark seaweed-brown, somewhat crinkled at the edge." The visible part was rectangular, perhaps two feet high and six feet long. The distance between the fin and the observers was approximately a hundred yards.

Meade-Waldo trained “a powerful pair” binoculars on the strange object. As the two naturalists watched, there rose just ahead of the fin a small head on a long neck. Meade-Waldo described the neck as "about the thickness of a slight man's body, and from seven to eight feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness ... The head had a very turtle-like appearance, as also the eye. It moved its head and neck from side to side in a peculiar manner: the color of the head and neck was dark brown above, and whitish below - almost white, I think."

Nicoll wrote, "Below the water we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature." Meade-Waldo recorded seeing a large body under water “behind the frill.”

The encounter lasted several minutes before the animal dropped astern of the Valhalla. Being under sail, the yacht could not come about. Meade-Waldo wrote later, "I shall never forget poor Nicoll's face of amazement when we looked at each other after we had passed out of sight of it ... "

Nicoll marveled, “This creature was an example, I consider, of what has been so often reported, for want of a better name, as the ‘great sea-serpent.’”

That was the only time the two men saw the creature. At 2:00 AM the next morning, though, three crewmembers reported spotting the same or a similar animal, almost entirely submerged.

The two men wrote up their encounter, and the Zoological Society's Proceedings carried their account of "a creature of most extraordinary form and proportions." Another version appears in Nicoll's 1908 book Three Voyages of A Naturalist.

There seems no reason to doubt the veracity or the powers of observation of these two men. A century after their encounter, the question remains: what was it that they saw?

Both were convinced it was an animal, but could not say what kind. The witnesses did not notice any diagnostic features such as hair, pectoral fins, gills, or nostrils.

While Nicoll admitted it was "impossible to be certain," he theorized the creature was a mammal. He wrote, "the general appearance of the creature, especially the soft, almost rubber-like fin, gave one this impression."

Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans wrote he’d seen conger eels rush about with head and forebody above water.  There are a few reports describing what the witnesses thought were giant eels. Four Irish fisherman claimed to have caught a nineteen-foot eel in 1915. Three years earlier, Captain Ruser of the German steamship Kaiserin Augusta Victoria had reported a giant eel off England. He described it as eighteen inches thick and twenty feet long. In 1971, English fisherman Stephen Smith was in the area of Ruser’s 1912 sighting when he claimed to have seen an eel more than twenty feet long. He described the head as resembling a conger eel’s but four times as large. Smith told an interviewer, “I have fished all over the world, but never have I seen something like this.”

There are also reports where the animal involved was not specifically called an eel but was described as eel-shaped. One such case occurred in 1947, when the Grace liner Santa Clara collided with a sea serpent. The ship’s officers described the animal as brown in color and perhaps sixty feet long.

What about Nicoll’s theory of a mammal? To begin with, there is no known mammal, living or extinct, which looks like the creature described in this incident. If we venture into the realm of possible unknown mammals, one option is a huge elongated seal. However, we have no fossil records indicating that a seal with a genuinely long neck ever existed, much less one with a dorsal fin.

Some cryptozoologists suggest sea serpents are surviving prehistoric snakelike whales, or archaeocetes, like those in the genus Basilosaurus. These, while elongated in form, did not have long necks. It’s possible a long-necked form evolved, but the available fossil record points the other way. Whale necks got progressively shorter, not longer, after the archaeocetes.

One group of animals that always come up in sea serpent discussions are the plesiosaurs. These Mesozoic reptiles (reptiles, not dinosaurs) make good sea serpent candidates in one respect: they had necks ranging from long to absurdly long. Will Cuppy, an American humorist, once wrote that plesiosaurs “might have a had a useful career as sea serpents, but they were before their time. There was nobody to scare except fish, and that was hardly worth while.” We know from fossils that plesiosaurs could not rear their necks high above the water, but the fairly low angle shown in a sketch in Nicoll’s book seems plausible.

Unfortunately, the fossil record for plesiosaurs and the other marine reptiles with similar body plans does not continue past the time of the K-T impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs. The famous case of the coelacanth has demonstrated that it’s possible for an animal to survive for a long time without leaving a fossil record, or, more precisely, without leaving one in places where humans have looked. A lot of land area remains unexplored by paleontologists, as does the entire sea floor. (Sasquatch proponents like to point out that, according to the fossil record, gorillas do not exist.)

Even if one assumes, though, that very large and widely distributed animals vanished from the fossil record while surviving in the flesh, the dorsal fin poses another problem. We have no fossils of plesiosaur-type beasts – and some of these are amazingly well preserved – which show any sort of dorsal fin. With their broad, turtle-like bodies, plesiosaurs did not need such fins for stability. It’s not impossible that a few species might have developed a fin for sexual display or some other purpose, but there is no evidence this took place.

Meade-Waldo, while he did not compare his animal to any known species, did refer back to the sea monster sighting made from the frigate HMS Daedalus in 1848. Witnesses in that incident described an animal sixty feet long or more, resembling "a large snake or eel."

Richard Ellis, whose 1994 book Monsters of the Sea is an excellent survey of the whole matter of marine cryptids, has offered a relatively conventional explanation for the Valhalla incident. Ellis, an expert on giant squid, theorized that a very large specimen swimming tentacles-first (which squid can do), could present a suitably strange appearance if it was holding one arm above the water. The description of the eye and mouth could result from misinterpretations of details on the arm or merely from imagination, since even expert observers can make errors when excited.

This explanation, as ingenious as it seems, is hard to picture in reality. First, Meade-Waldo must have made a much bigger mistake than just the details on the head, since he specifically described a large body aft of the fin. To offer the appearance Ellis suggests, the squid would have to swim on its side, keeping one fin partly exposed and one limb constantly above the surface. It must have held that unnatural and pointless position for several minutes. It might be possible for a squid to do this (or it might not – we know very little about them), but it seems impossible to explain why it would do so.

Can there be large seagoing animals still unknown to us? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a well-founded and scientific “yes.” Until recently, the Indopacific beaked whale (a.k.a. Longman’s beaked whale), Mesoplodon pacificus, was known from two weathered skulls found on beaches 73 years and thousands of miles apart. No one knew what the living animal looked like, or even if the species still existed, until one beached intact in Japan in 2002. Perrin’s beaked whale, Mesoplodon perrini, was described from stranded specimens in 2002. 
A new beaked whale was found in Alaska in 2016. A new species of whale has been discovered based on a body, 7.3m long, that floated ashore on the Pribilof Islands.  This is just marvelous. I follow news of new and unidentified whales all the time, and I never heard a word about this, although it's apparently known to Japanese fishers, so it must have a range that spreads to the west.    This isn't a case where someone had it in hand and decided that its features or DNA warranted a split of a known species, as was the case with Balaenoptera omurai in 2003. This species was confirmed by DNA work, which resulted in reordering of its genus, but it began with a brand-new discovery from the field, when a biology teacher called in a seal researcher he knew who said, "This is weird," and then she called in a cetologist. Other previously collected (misidentified) skeletons have been located. 
The published abstract from Marine Mammal Science begins thus:
Philip A. Morin, et. al.There are two recognized species in the genus Berardius, Baird's and Arnoux's beaked whales. In Japan, whalers have traditionally recognized two forms of Baird's beaked whales, the common “slate-gray” form and a smaller, rare “black” form. Previous comparison of mtDNA control region sequences from three black specimens to gray specimens around Japan indicated that the two forms comprise different stocks and potentially different species...

Wilson's whale. Note the white underside in the top picture.(I believe the picture, copied from Heuvelmans here, to be out of copyright: if anyone knows differently, please tell me). 

Type D (Wikimedia Commons)


The full description with  the full scientific name has not yet been published. 

The megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios), up to sixteen feet long, was unknown until 1976, when one was snagged accidentally in a sea anchor. In this case, “unknown” means “completely unknown.’ Despite its size, its slow speed, and its distinctive appearance (the megamouth looks like a living blimp and resembles no other shark) there were no sighting reports, no strandings, nothing before that chance encounter.

Other sizable marine animals are apparently still at large. From my book Shadows of Existence (2006)

Two researchers who manned the submersible Deepstar 4000 on a 1966 probe of the eastern Pacific, for example, had an uncomfortably close encounter with an awesome denizen of the deep.  They were motoring along at a depth of 4,000 feet in the San Diego Trough when a dark-colored, mottled fish estimated to be thirty to forty feet long swam right up to the eighteen-foot sub.  The fish studied the craft with eyes "as big as dinner plates," then moved off, much to the relief of the startled aquanauts. 

Automatic cameras lowered into the same area took pictures of a large fish identified as a rare Pacific sleeper shark.  If this was what the Deepstar met, it would be, by far, the largest sleeper shark ever seen. 

The witnesses, pilot Joe Thompson and oceanographer Dr. Eugene LaFond, doubted their visitor was a shark.  Both men described a round tail like a grouper's rather than a sharklike tail.  Additionally, the eyes described were much too large for a sleeper shark.  

In the fascinating new book Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling (Da Capo Press, 2008) Andrew Darby chronicles the long and often bloody interactions between humans and whales. He also includes this item in his discussion of the now-closed whaling center on King George Sound in Albany, Western Australia. In the 1970s, when whalers like Captain George Cruikshank followed sperm whales with sonar, they often watched something they couldn’t identify in the 4000-meter-deep Albany Canyon.

"'The mystery bugger,' they called it...They would pick it up always at the same spot, and follow it by sonar as it cruised through the canyon, leaving a larger imprint on the screen than a whale. The creature would almost break the surface and then disappear. It was no air breather. It might have been a giant squid, or a giant shark. They never found out." (p.96)

Then we have Marvin. Off a Shell Oil rig near Santa Barbara,in 1966, a colonial invertebrate (that's the best guess) was filmed by an underwater camera. It was estimated at 15 feet long and moved by turning itself so its screw-like shape could pull it through the water. That sounds incredible, but here's the film (copyright unknown, fair use claimed) 

Now we come to one of my favorites, Wilson's whale.

Dr. Edward A. Wilson was a painter/naturalist on board the 1901-04 Discovery expedition to the Antarctic, led by Robert Falcon Scott. In 1902, Wilson painted an unknown whale with a high, slender dorsal fin and a solid black back, with no orca-type eyepatch observed. (One image does indicate a white underside.) I wrote in the chapter on mystery cetaceans in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence that the distinctive markings of an orca could not have been overlooked, and Richard Ellis and Dr. Darren Naish reviewed that chapter for me without objecting to that statement. Now I wonder. 

What made me wonder was the paper by Pitman, et. al., on an orca called Type D.  Type D, it seems, is a rarely observed but very distinctive orca that may be a separate species.  It's relatively small for an orca, and has  a tiny eyepatch and no gray dorsal "cape" marking.  In other words, it's not a perfect match to Wilson's whale - he'd have had to miss the eyepatch in his observations -  but it looks more like it than any creature yet documented.  

The dates of sighting are given as 28 and 29 January: Discovery stopped at Cape Crozier on 22 January and reached and named King Edward Land on 30 January, so my amateur reckoning puts them between 76 and 77 South. This creates a problem. The Type D has not definitely been identified below 60, and Robert Pitman told me in correspondence he can't imagine it goes below 65 or so - the water is just too cold for it. As for the visual match, Pitman writes, "Intriguing speculation but it would be difficult to say with any certainty - just not quite enough in the illustrations to be convincing."  He doesn't have an opinion on what Wilson's whale was, though he notes that, at the time, there was thought to be just one species of orca (heck, a hundred years after Wilson that's still what we thought) and it wasn't clear whether Wilson was saying his whale was not an orca (I have to get Wilson's book on the expedition).Anyway, Wilson's whale is a mystery. I thought for a bit there I'd solved it, but no.  If it was a Type D orca, it was way out of its range, and if it was some other orca, then Wilson could hardly have missed the markings.  So what was it? An odd orca of another type, one with minimal markings? An unknown type orca? Something else entirely?   

In 1998, employing a statistical technique used in biology to estimate the diversity of animal populations, Oxford University’s Dr. Charles Paxton calculated the likely number of marine animals measuring two meters (six and a half feet) or longer still awaiting classification. While Paxton admitted this technique is inexact, based as it is on the discovery rate and total number of such species found so far, his estimate of 47 species was an eye-opener.

Paxton thought the oceanic types still to be found included mainly whales and sharks, although he allowed for the possibility that some might be totally new types of animals. Meade-Waldo and Nicoll, were they here to speak to us, would no doubt agree on that point.

We must wait and see what answers the next hundred years will bring.

REFERENCES

Anonymous. 2003. “Whale species is new to science,” BBC News World Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk, November 19.

Australian Museum. 2003. “Longman’s Beaked Whale,” Fact sheet.

Baker, Mary L. 1987. Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises of the World. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co.

Carwardine, Mark. 1995. Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. New York: Doring Kindersley.

Dalebout, Merel. 2003. Personal communication, October 28.

Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2003. “Appearance, distribution, and genetic distinctiveness of Longman’s beaked whale, Indopacetus pacificus,” Marine Mammal Science 19:3, p.421.

Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2002. “A new species of beaked whale Mesoplodon perrini sp. n. (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) discovered through phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences,” Marine Mammal Science 18:3, p.577.

Ellis, Richard. 2003. Personal communication, November 22. Also 2000, March 10.

Ellis, Richard. 2003. Sea Dragons. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Ellis, Richard. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid. New York: Lyons Press.

Ellis, Richard. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. New York: Knopf.

Gould, Rupert T. 1930. The Case for the Sea Serpent. London: Philip Allan.

Harrison, Paul. 2001. Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters of the British Isles. London: Robert Hale.

Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents. NY: Hill and Wang.

Meade-Waldo, E.G.B., and Nicoll, Michael J., 1906. "Description of an Unknown Animal Seen at Sea off the Coast of Brazil," Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, p.719.

Nicoll, Michael J. 1908. Three Voyages of a Naturalist. London: Witherby and Co.

Molloy, R. 1915. “A Queer Tale of Flanagan and the Eel off Dalkey Sound,” publication title unknown, August 28. Available at http://www.clubi.ie/dalkeyhomepage/ee.html.

Pitman, Robert. 2003. Personal communication, October 27. Also 1997, April 3.

Pitman, Robert, 1999. “Sightings and Possible Identity of a Bottlenose Whale in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Indopacetus pacificus?” Marine Mammal Science 15(2), p.531.

Pitman, Robert. 1987. “Observations of an Unidentified Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon Sp.) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science 3(4), October, p.345.

Ralls, Katherine, and Robert L. Brownell, Jr. 1991. "A whale of a new species," Nature, April 18.

Taylor, L.R., Compagno, L.J.V., and Struhsaker, P.J. (1983). “Megamouth - a new species, genus, and family of lamnoid shark (Megachasma pelagios, family Megachasmidae) from the Hawaiian Islands,” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, vol. 43, p.87.

Urban-Ramirez, Jose. 1992. “First Record of the Pygmy Beaked Whale Mesoplodon Peruvianus in the North Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science, October, p.420.

Wood, Gerald L.  Animal Facts and Feats.  Sterling Publishing Co., New York, 1977.

Yamada, Tadasu. 2002. “On an unidentified beaked whale found stranded in Kagoshima,” paper from the National Science Museum, Tokyo, December 25.