Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/23/bringing-dna-testing-to-the-lo.html
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It will all turn out to be Bigfoot DNA…
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How the hell did he get funding for this silly idea? Neil Gemmell must be a genius to pull that off. I suppose an absence of evidence is good enough for evidence of absence when talking about imaginary things.
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But we all know the real deal.
Jack the Ripper was the Loch Ness Monster
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I reckon we won’t find much new. Maybe some fish species not previously known to live there, tops I’d guess.
Many of the sightings sound like:
- A ball of baitfish, with a nearby predator (“roiling water”). There are ample predators in the loch.
- A whale or dolphin which swam upstream from Inverness. (They are occasionally found in the Thames in London, which is a longer trek upstream)
- Drunk people.
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Okay, they use EDNA to find endangered species in water, which makes sense. The article mentions scales. What scales are they going to get? If they could get scales from Nessie, then she would have already been found!
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I listened to an interview with him the other day, which was amusing.
He doesn’t expect to find Nessie; he isn’t stupid. But this is a good way to illuminate how dna research techniques have advanced in recent years. It’s a cheap profile builder - I’d expect the whole “expedition” will cost something like 10 - 20,000 dollars.
He also mentioned that his kids and their friends thought this was by far the coolest thing he’d ever done, and seemed genuinely delighted about that 
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I shrugged off the idea of a large animal in Loch Ness for a long time, but the fact that there are similar stories from multiple large lakes on the planet made me think there is some undocumented creature, and my best guess is it’s a huge mollusk, like a slug that spends most of it’s time below the silt at the bottom, which is why we never find it. People are so hung up on the idea of a ‘plesiosaur’ when these lakes can’t support a breeding population of them.
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Yep. I was doing some reading on fish species. The brown trout in Loch Ness that turn cannibal only manage to reach 18 pounds.
While that seems like a big trout, it’s not that big for a brown trout. It must mean that there’s just not enough food for them to manage much bigger size.
Either that, or the bait fish population of the lake is completely underestimated and the big trout are feeding the plesiosaurs. /me ducks
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Well, the other thing is “what constitutes a breeding population?” You can’t have just one plesiosaur, you can’t even have just two, you’d need enough to keep the genes healthy for millennia, which means there’d be sightings nearly every day. I’m not even convinced of a giant slug, but that seems more likely, and to my knowledge nobody is pursuing that idea, so these Nessie expeditions are like looking for a set of lost keys in your pocket over and over (reaches in pocket “nope, still no keys.”)
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Agree. Loch Ness, while quite deep (almost 800 feet), is less than two cubic miles of water.
For comparison, Lake Michigan is almost 1200 cubic miles of water. If you’re thinking Lake Michigan better fuels the imagination for hiding mysterious beasts, Japan has you covered.
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Sunken logs. Plain and simple. They first become saturated with water and sink. They settle to the bottom and become adhered to the mud. Bacteria slowly digest the wood and produce gas that is trapped in and under the log. At some point, the buoyancy overcomes the adhesion and the log rises to the surface in a tumbling froth. After a few moments/minutes enough trapped gas is released and the log sinks to the bottom again. Yes, seen all around the world. Sorry to be a party pooper.
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I have, as my wallpaper, a lovely night skyline of my small city. And there, in the corner, is something…
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Is it too soon to nominate this for the Ig Nobel Prize?
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Also Lake Michigan, unlike Loch Ness, is more likely to have toxic waste spawned mutants rising from its depths.
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DNA? Yeah, right.
Time to get the real story.
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One of the best theories I have heard is a large pike or sturgeon.
You wouldn’t even need a breeding population for a sturgeon – it could live long enough for the legend.
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