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Sunday, August 27, 2023

One More Nessie Hunt

 All all-out hunt for the Loch Ness monster yielded - alas - nothing. 

The group Loch Ness Exploration and the Loch Ness Centre invited cryptozoologists and Nessie fans all over the world to join them for a Quest Weekend of searching with drones, boats, sonar, hydrophones, cameras, and luck.  Nessie, as always, remained elusive.  


 watched tonight's NBC coverage, which included my cryptozoologist friend Ken Gerhard, who'd crossed the Atlantic to lend a hand.  Ken phrased it cautiously, but everybody HOPED this festival of monster-hunting would come up with something. 

Was there anything to find? I've long since closed my own file on Nessie, but the myth is smashing good fun for all as well as a thriving tourist industry. 

Anyone can go look for Nessie. People of all kinds are sure they have seen Nessie. A grad student I knew in the 80s,  with a psychology degree, and whom I'd trust on anything without question, reported she'd seen something like a round orangish head pop up near her tour boat.  I don't know what she saw, although I assume the color was some trick of the light. I'm not ready for orange monsters. 

The Nessie business really began in the 1930s. There are only a handful of earlier reports, none of them particularly convincing. The oldest report of all, a colorful account of Saint Columba confronting a monster in the year 565 or thereabouts, is actually placed in the River Ness, which connects the loch to the sea.  The existence of this river suggests the possibility of an ocean-dwelling creature either migrating in and out or trapped in the loch. Unfortunately, the river is very shallow today, and nothing larger than a seal could make such a journey undetected. The loch, for the record, is about twenty-four miles long, up to 900 feet deep, and has a substantial, though not bountiful, population of fish including eels, salmon, and char. 

The major outbreak of sightings which occurred in 1933 may be linked to a road-improvement project  along the north side of the loch, which provided motorists with a much better view and could conceivably have disturbed a creature living in the water.  Then, as now, there was a tendency to refer to “the monster” as an individual. To explain the record of sightings over the next sixty years, however (given the aforementioned lack of access between the loch and the ocean), a breeding colony is required.  Incidentally, the loch surface is some 50 feet above sea level, ruling out any connection to the sea via an underground cavern.  (Claims of finding cave or tunnel entrances on sonar have been made, but never verified.)

From the beginning, some people have suggested the whole thing was a hoax. One of the first well-publicized sightings, in May 1933, was made by the couple who ran the lakeshore Drumnadrochit Hotel.  The sighting was reported to the Inverness Courier by Alex Campbell, a water bailiff (an official who enforces fishing laws).  Campbell later claimed to have made several sightings himself, and some skeptics believe he virtually invented the monster.  A local author who wrote under the name Lester Smith said he invented Nessie to draw business for local hotels.

What were people reporting?  Sometimes it was merely a hump, or two or more humps in line.  Some people (such as Campbell, in his own first sighting in September 1933), reported a large hump plus a slender neck, estimated to stretch five feet long or longer, and a small head.  The whole visible length, Campbell thought, was about thirty feet.  According to the first on-site survey of witnesses, conducted by Rupert Gould in 1933, this plesiosaur-type configuration matched most sighting reports.  The chief discrepancy between witnesses concerned the number of humps.

Eyewitness reports since then have added virtually nothing to this basic picture.  Witnesses differ (as might be expected) on the presence and shape of  small features such as eyes, “horns," etc. The color has been described as everything from black to reddish-brown to olive drab, only rarely with mottling or other markings.   

Without good evidence for the existence of Nessies, it is not very useful to speculate on what they might be.  Despite this fact, no one involved in the subject can resist such speculation.  Some of the suggestions made so far include giant otters, huge thick-bodied eels, embolomers (greatly enlarged descendants of prehistoric amphibians), plesiosaurs, archaeocetes (primitive whales), other types of mammals, including hypothetical long-necked sirenians or pinnipeds, and invertebrates of various kinds. A 2019 eDNA study, though, essentially ruled out them all.  Some Nessie-lovers suggested that, since it showed (as expected) eel DNA, Nessie could still be a giant eel.  Maybe, but we're talking common eels, not the 10-foot ocean-going congers one can imagine might scale up.  

The Loch Ness monster, though, remains a celebrity. There are countless Web sites, at least two with live cameras trained on the loch, and several organizations. At Loch Ness itself are two exhibitions and plenty of opportunities to buy stuffed monsters, vials of Loch water, photographs, and even “monster droppings” (lumps of peat).  By one estimate back around 2000, the monster was worth twenty-five million pounds a year to the local economy.

Press attention has abated somewhat since the high point of the 1970s, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared.  Neither have sightings. Yet the skeptics have had the best of the debate for a long time.

I'll admit the famous Dinsdale still bothers me. It doesn't look to me like a boat, and the various enlargements and enhancements have failed to bring out details supporting the boat hypothesis. Aside from that, though... 

Despite biology, it seems there will always remain an aura of mystery around Loch Ness.  This may not be very satisfying for science, but it is, I think, good for the human spirit.  A world without mysteries would be a grim place indeed.  May Nessie (whatever it is) live on!


Matt Bille is the author of three cryptology books, most recently Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library (Hangar 1, 2021), Visit www.mattbilleauthor.com

    He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!


Friday, August 18, 2023

An Engaging Sasquatch Book for Young Readers

 The Search for Sasquatch (A Wild Thing Book)

Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2022

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Sasquatch-Wild-Thing-Book/dp/1419758187

by Laura Krantz 

Krantz is a journalist and podcaster whose Wild Things podcast has garnered accolades from heavy hitters like Scientific American.  She is also a cousin to anthropologist Grover Krantz, something she didn’t know growing up. When she found out, it sparked her effort to learn more about Bigfoot and the resulting book for grade school and middle school readers.


I found a signed copy of this by accident. In an amusing coincidence, I saw it in the gift shop of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where I was hoping to persuade the manager to carry my latest book on cryptozoology. 

When I got it home and dug in, I found a well-written, intriguing tale mixing research and her own discussions with Bigfoot hunters and scientists. She makes one field hike, without results, but her talks with people like Todd Disotell and Jeff Meldrum are useful. She covers everything from discoveries like Lucy and the “hobbits” to the basics of DNA. She steps nicely through the basic scientific method to examine the hypothesis that Bigfoot made a particular “nest” she saw.  Fieldwork and the casting of footprints are here, too.  Krantz might lose the youngest readers while explaining the difference between hominin and hominoid and some of the DNA material, but I don’t think they will mind.  Krantz agrees that nothing but a body will settle the question once and for all. She writes that Bigfoot hunting must “apply the same rules of science” as other endeavors and dismisses the “Woo” crowd.

Her chapter notes and bibliography are unusually complete for a YA book, and that’s laudable despite the dearth of skeptical material (I suggest adding a link to Junior Skeptic.)  This is the best recent book I’ve read for kids who want to be drawn into the mystery, which she notes at the end may be more enjoyable and enduring than the purported animal. If I were in third grade on up (I was precocious) I would devour this book.  Heck, I devoured it now.

There are some glitches. In a book that includes some well-described science, Krantz never discusses the problem of how any of the possible ancestors made it to the Americas. She also misstates the DNA results from recent Loch Ness and Yeti endeavors.  But there’s a lot here for inquiring young minds. 

Bottom line: buy it for your kids. This tale of a hairy giant may get them interested in learning about wildlife or hiking into the woods looking for animals, footprints, and so on. If not, it’s engaging enough to at least get them out of your hair for a while.


Matt Bille

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

Book Review: The Mysteries of Eels

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

Svensson, Patrik (2019: ECCO, 241pp.)     

This is a unique book by an author who mingles eel science with his own story of growing up in Sweden hunting them with his father as he relates humanity's attempts to understand these mysterious fishes. 
 

He begins on the science side with Aristotle, who described eels accurately but could not figure out their reproductive process: he finally, perhaps in desperation, wrote they were born from the mud. As we follow the very slow unraveling of the eel secrets by human scientists, we learn that among other things Sigmund Freud spent a year dissecting eels. 
The hero of the story is Danish marine biologist Johanne Schmidt, who went all over the Atlantic Ocean catching thousands of eels as he strove to understand where they were born and where they died. We think today that the answers are most likely lie in the region known as the Sargasso Sea. However, eels keep a shroud of mystery wrapped around them: while our tracking of their movements as larvae and as adults shows they swim to and from the Sargasso Sea, no one has caught an eel of any age there. 
He writes, “a scientifically minded optimist would say it's just a matter of time.” He also notes, however, that the time may run out. Eels are overfished, and decades of effort by Japanese experts to farm them have proven a costly and frustrating failure. 
Svensson's philosophical observations can go a bit far afield, such when he quotes scripture about faith in Jesus having something to do with the belief in the mystery and importance of eels. He does not attempt to explore all the species of eels, focusing mainly on those in the Atlantic and is not address some interesting issues like how big they get. This is as much a captivating personal journey as it is a study of the eel's hidden wanderings.

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Wednesday, August 02, 2023

The Mother of All Whales

When I saw this article, I seriously, for just a moment, looked at the calendar to confirm it was not April 1. I never believed such an animal was possible. I don't know any scientists who would have disagreed. If someone wanted to bet me there's been a potential 300-ton whale, I'd have put down a thousand dollars and walked off laughing.




Imagine this titantic animal. Now imagine one up to three times its size (educational fair use claimed) 




Florent Goussard/Imaging and Analysis Centre at the Natural History Museum London. Fair use claimed

Nevertheless, here it is.
It's an article of faith among cetologists that the blue whale has evolved the most efficient feeding system ever (it's basically shoving pure protein into a gigantic mouth), and nothing could be bigger and get adequate nutrition. We don't know how this monster sustained itself. There's a great deal we have to study.
But this is a great day for science. We found something spectacular that no one believed could exist. It doesn't get any better than that.

UPDATE: there was immediate pushback about the idea this seagoing monster weighed 300 t, and it seems highly unlikely.  What is known is more than enough. This is one of the largest animals ever to live, and we knew naught of it until now.  See the update on this group at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-first-whales-to-rule-the-seas-were-giganticand-tiny-180983202/  

Interested in zoology? Read Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library.! 



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 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!