The Loch Ness monster could be a giant eel, researchers say

The famed and so-far mythical Loch Ness "monster" has defied searchers and scientists out to prove or disprove its existence since the 1930s.

Now a New Zealand scientist says a giant specimen of eel could conceivably have been the cause of some of the alleged "Nessie" sightings over the years.

Prof. Neil Gemmell—a University of Otago geneticist who headed up a two-week water-sampling expedition in Scotland's Loch Ness in June 2018—told BBC News today (September 5) that his and other researchers' analyses have determined that no sturgeon, shark, or plesiosaur DNA turned up in the water samples obtained last year and analyzed in labs in four countries.

Giant sturgeon and landlocked sharks—along with the more fanciful plesiosaur theory, which posited that Nessie was a lone survivor of the species of large marine reptiles that became extinct about 66 million years ago—were some of the more credible explanations for the legendary creature said to reside in the loch, a deep, 37-kilometre-long body of water that holds more freshwater than all the lakes in England and Wales combined.

The loch's depth (755 feet) and its murky waters (caused by a high peat content) have long encouraged monster proponents, who claim that Nessie could merely have hidden from searchers for almost a century.

However, ever since an alleged 1933 sighting that kicked off the modern era of supposed monster appearances (including a famous grainy photo that was later proven to be a hoax), scientific or photographic proof of the supposed creature has failed to surface, despite numerous efforts to obtain same.

Prof. Gemmell told the BBC in May 2018, prior to the sampling expedition, that he didn't believe in the monster itself but that it made a good "hook" for the project, which he predicted would unearth "an extraordinary amount of new knowledge".

More than a year later, he told the same media outlet that although the DNA-sequence samples found and compared to DNA contained in a huge international database ruled out some existing fish species—as well as large reptile species such as the plesiosaur—the skin and scale evidence did point to the presence of numerous European eels in the loch.

"We can't find any evidence of a creature that's remotely related to that [a plesiosaur] in our environmental-DNA sequence data. So, sorry, I don't think the plesiosaur idea holds up based on the data that we have obtained.

"So there's no shark DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. There is also no catfish DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. We can't find any evidence of sturgeon either.

"There is a very significant amount of eel DNA. Eels are very plentiful in Loch Ness, with eel DNA found at pretty much every location sampled—there are a lot of them. So, are they giant eels? Well, our data doesn't reveal their size, but the sheer quantity of the material says that we can't discount the possibility that there may be giant eels in Loch Ness. Therefore we can't discount the possibility that what people see and believe is the Loch Ness monster might be a giant eel."

The European eel, which is listed as endangered, seldom attains a length of more than one metre. European marine conger eels, which can grow to be about three metres long, have not been recorded in the freshwater loch, which is connected to the North Sea by the River Ness, a canal, and Moray Firth.

Sightings of the mythical beast have been variously attributed over the years to swans, otters, floating logs, large tree branches, swimming circus elephants, and boat wakes.