Storming Nessie.

Yes, everyone keeps bringing up the St Columba sighting in the 6th Century, but....if you read the whole of the life of St. Columba by Adoman he pretty much lives out a constant 'X-file' life, battling with loads of supernatural beasts and monsters. So if you believe this account, do you also believe him casting a demon out of a pail, calming storms and monstrous wild beasts, returning the dead to life etc. ?

Given how many tricky crimes Columbo solves, I'd believe him capable of all those "just one more" things.
 
Perhaps you are aware, but that the beginning of the modern sightings of Nessie*, in 1933 coincided with the release of King Kong, which is interesting given the sauropod/tryannasaur battle in the film. Likely have been a big factor in the apparent sighting of a long-necked sauropod-like creature in the loch! As well as the newspapers stoking of the matter. Slow news days?
I'd actually never considered this but, timewise, there could be something in it. :unsure:
 
Maybe we will have to wait for the invention of Star Trek style scanners and then scan the loch for lifeforms
 
Nessie, Big Foot, the Yeti: they all seem to come and go every few years. I think aliens are behind all of it. They're sitting up there in space, looking down at us and occasionally saying to each other, "I think they're a little bored down there. Why don't we play a game of hide and seek with them? They'll enjoy it and it'll tire them out, so we can finally get some peace and quiet."
 
Maybe we will have to wait for the invention of Star Trek style scanners and then scan the loch for lifeforms
Actually, we already have a way to do this. Marine biologists no longer need to net or fish to discover what species are living in an area of he sea/ocean/lake. They can simply take a sample of water and analyse it for the DNA of each species. So theoretically, if you have samples of 'long-necked sauropod-like creatures' with which to try to get a DNA match, then it ought to be very easy to see if they are present in that body of water. I also expect that we could get that DNA somehow, however, I think it is tricky (Jurassic Park is not yet a reality) and you need more than just some bones - preserved flesh (like frozen in a glacier) or bone marrow. I'm not an expert on this, but maybe the organic matter in dentine from teeth can be used (if sauropods had teeth.) Anyway, my point is that this is not totally beyond the realms of the imagination, and very likely to be a 'thing' in the future.
 
Marine biologists no longer need to net or fish to discover what species are living in an area of he sea/ocean/lake. They can simply take a sample of water and analyse it for the DNA of each species.
They already have done this for Loch Ness:
Researchers from New Zealand have tried to catalogue all living species in the loch by extracting DNA from water samples. Following analysis, the scientists have ruled out the presence of large animals said to be behind reports of a monster.
 
I had no idea that had been done, but it makes prefect sense. So, it definitely isn't a sauropod or mammal, but I see they said that it could be a giant eel, which is exactly what I said earlier in this thread. There must also be some substance to the Lambton Worm, Sockburn Worm and other Wyvern stories that could be explained by giant eels.
 

... Gary Campbell, the keeper of the register, said: “Loch Ness is teeming with eels and about 20 years ago a fisherman came to me and said, ‘Listen I’ve got to tell you. We’ve got a 16ft boat with an outboard and when we were fishing on Loch Ness an eel passed on the surface of the water and it was longer than the boat’.

“In the 1980s the staff at the Foyers power station found a water inlet wasn’t working because it was clogged by eels and one of them was 18ft long.” ...
 
So, has the Nessie question finally been solved? It is/was a giant eel?

European eels only grow to 1m long. The Moray eel is bigger, but still not big enough. However, the Slender Giant Moray or Gangetic moray, Strophidon sathete, is the longest member of the family of moray eels. The longest recorded specimen was caught in 1927 on the Maroochy River in Queensland; it measured 3.94 metres.

As far as I remember, there are locks on the Caledonian Canal at either end of Loch Ness. The juvenile eels could swim in and grow to adulthood, but the locks would prevent anything that long gaining exit, at least unseen. Once inside it would be stuck in Loch Ness. It would be unable to swim back into the ocean to spawn and die.

They can, however, live for years in freshwater, growing bigger and bigger. Once it had eaten all the fish, hungry and cold, it would come up to the foreshore of the loch and snatch away lambs and little babies. [doubtful]

So, they should build special Nessie eel ladders parallel to the locks. I'd subscribe to the fund.
 
So, has the Nessie question finally been solved? It is/was a giant eel?
Interesting there really seems to be something unusual out there, though? More than just a hoax or mistaken bits of wood and things like that?
 
As far as I remember, there are locks on the Caledonian Canal at either end of Loch Ness. The juvenile eels could swim in and grow to adulthood, but the locks would prevent anything that long gaining exit, at least unseen. Once inside it would be stuck in Loch Ness. It would be unable to swim back into the ocean to spawn and die.
Well that's a sort of yes and no. There are indeed locks at either end of the Caledonian canal but at the Inverness end the outflow from Loch Ness runs (via another very small loch) into both the last stretch of the Caledonian canal (and it's final couple of locks) and the river Ness which flows through Inverness and out to sea by the Moray Firth. The only obstacle in the river route is the weir where the canal splits off from the river (I used to live about 100m down the canal from the weir). Whilst that might present a significant obstacle to an eel swimming upriver (I don't know if they are as nimble at a leaping salmon) but it is not a massively high weir and it would present no significant obstacle going downstream.
 
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Interesting there really seems to be something unusual out there, though? More than just a hoax or mistaken bits of wood and things like that?
Most people living up here (at least those who don't regularly patronise the Inverness Flat Earth café - yes there is one!) would say "no there doesn't seem to be anything unusual in Loch Ness". But they would also say "Long may the tourists keep coming here and spending their money." The "Loch Ness Monster" is arguably the most powerful tourist advert that Inverness has ever had.
 
... the Inverness Flat Earth café - yes there is one!) ...
Not that I doubted you, lol:


But you have to register log in to check-out the website; I'm not too sure I really want to do that:
 
it would present no significant obstacle going downstream.
Even something that was 4 metres long?

Anyway, it is fun to speculate. They have discovered deep sea fish that were once thought to be extinct (coelacanths) but they reason I was never sold on the aquatic mammal or reptile idea is that you would need a population of them to survive, not one single individual that has lived for thousands and thousands of years. The life-cycle of the eel avoids that problem as they swim thousands of miles to spawn in the ocean, but live most of their lives in freshwater, and one individual might be found alone.
 
I vaguely recall when I was a nipper hearing stories of underground caverns, linking the biggest of the lochs and possibly providing a route to the sea. The notion at the time was that Morag and Nessie were either the same beast or members of the same family. Of course, there were also rumours in Dunbar of a secret tunnel from the castle to the high street (the ghost of 'Black' Agnes was said to roam this tunnel at night). Neither have been found. I'm assuming both are fanciful notions provided by people who want to shore up their beliefs.
 
I think they used sonar to map the bottom of the loch a few decades ago. I'm sure they would have discovered any tunnels. If the rumours bring in extra tourism then I'm all for them to continue. However, monster and ghost hunters are a strange breed of tourist to want to attract.
 
Coincidentally, the Discovery channel has a documentary about the DNA analysis of Loch Ness on this Sunday 15th September at 7.30pm. Unfortunately, I don't subscribe to that, so you'll have to tell me what they say. Also, that famous picture of the monster (the one shown in @RJM Corbet 's link to The Times article, and which is also used to advertise this TV programme) is not a photograph of an eel. So, either that is a fake photo (which I thought was generally assumed) or it isn't an eel.
 
... that famous picture of the monster (the one shown in @RJM Corbet 's link to The Times article, and which is also used to advertise this TV programme) is not a photograph of an eel. So, either that is a fake photo (which I thought was generally assumed) or it isn't an eel.
It's an acknowledged fake. Apparently it was a head moulded from putty attached to a toy submarime ...
 
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It's an acknowledged fake. Apparently it was a head moulded from putty attached to a toy submarime ...
Curiosity just made me take another look at that photo and I really don't think it's even that. The 'shadow' of the neck and head has perfectly smooth edges whilst the water is clearly rippled so the shadow edges would be rippled to. That shadow just looks blatantly fake to me. I don't think I've ever really bothered to look at that image closely before!
 

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