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One difficulty with the catalogue of Loch Ness Monster sightings – and one of the reasons so many identities have been proposed for the creature – is that they tend to vary widely. Sometimes the head is small and rounded, sometimes it’s horse-like; sometimes the skin is brown and smooth, sometimes green and scaly; and so on. Nessie detractors often use this fact as evidence that the monster doesn’t exist. But this is unfair. There exists no context, no frame of reference for Loch Ness Monster sightings; real witnesses literally wouldn’t know what they were seeing. And as such, even the most careful, scientifically educated observers would become as the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. And all this is to say nothing of the inevitable mythologizing of a huge, prehistoric-seeming creature of the depths. If there is such a creature as the Loch Ness Monster, this kind of variation of description would be entirely to be expected at this stage.

One unfortunate result of this is that there really cannot be an identity proposal for the creature that is going to neatly explain all of the sightings. Nessies either have small, rounded heads or horse-like heads, and presumably not both. There are, however, certain overall tendencies in the sighting reports, taken as a group, and these tendencies can be instructive.

More Loch Ness Monster sightings describe the small head than the equine one, for example. It is actually not all that frequent for the head to be described at all, in fact; generally speaking, Nessie appears as a simple lump, moving through the loch. This lump – or, sometimes, pair or trio of lumps – is most often dark brown or grey, and smooth in texture. When the head does appear, it is perched on the long neck for which the monster is so famous. But this neck is rarely near so long as it is often held to be; it is usually much shorter and thicker than the long, swanlike neck so frequently depicted for the creature. Fins and tail are rarely reported, as these rarely break the surface. There are a few famous sightings with the full plesiosaurine complement of four flippers, but more often only one or two, toward the front of the animal, are visible.

There is a possible identity for the Loch Ness Monster that covers most of this, without resorting to the Mesozoic Era or attaching wild new evolutionary features to other animals. That identity is an eel, an eel that happens to be of enormous size. Eels can and do stick their necks up out of the water. Large eels tend to become bulbous in the center, and the three-humped sightings could be glimpses of the top of the head, the body, and the tail. Eels have a pair of fins toward the front, and they of course have gills. And Loch Ness does support eels; a relatively large population of European eels certainly exists in its waters (‘relatively large’ because Loch Ness doesn’t have much of a population of anything; the poor sunlight-penetration prevents much of an ecology). Nessie detractors have actually sometimes been heard to say, “There’s no Loch Ness Monster; it’s just a giant eel.” I’m sorry? Can you show me one of these giant eels? When did giant eels become so common and unexciting that their appearance amounts to a buzzkill?

Now, there are two major problems with the eel hypothesis.

The first is that all known species of freshwater eels migrate to the ocean in order to breed. And the best route to the ocean from Loch Ness is the River Ness, which passes right through the middle of the city of Inverness. And Inverness is far too large of a city to suppose that 30-foot eels are slipping through it unnoticed every so often. We could, perhaps, propose that Nessie is a sort of eel that breeds in freshwater, but it is best to avoid having to make too many twists and turns of this sort in our identification.

Secondly, as hinted above, Loch Ness doesn’t have much of a biomass in it. The peat blocks out the sun, which means there isn’t much plant life, which means there isn’t much animal life – mostly eels and salmon. And so the question must be raised: What does the Loch Ness Monster eat? This is a problem not only with the eel hypothesis, but with the Nessie idea as a whole. A number of studies of the Loch’s biosphere have been made, and some of them do indicate sufficient food, in the form of fish and eels, for a small population of 30-foot animals. Others, however, do not. And even if the former is true, it is only just barely so.

In the May 2004 issue of Fortean Times, Jon Downes, the director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, made a proposal that neatly addressed both of these issues. It went something like this:

There is evidence that, every now and then, an individual European eel will fail to develop sexual characteristics, or otherwise become sterile. With this loss comes the loss of the instinct to migrate to the ocean to breed. Such eels, if they are lucky, clever, or the like, then prosper in the environments their fellows have abandoned, and they continue to grow, achieving enormous size. There are reports that such ‘eunuch eels,’ up to 15 feet in length, have cropped up all across Europe. Why, then, can the Loch Ness Monster not be a particularly large example of this phenomenon? This explanation would, by definition, put paid to our first problem with the giant eel hypothesis, and it would also solve the second – Loch Ness may not be able to support a breeding population of large animals, but it could definitely feed one or two. Most likely, this phenomenon would have to be happening every now and then in Loch Ness, to account the length of time that sightings have been reported. Perhaps, at any given time, there are two or three such ‘eunuch eels’ in the Loch, or one, or none at all, until the next develops. There would most likely have to be something about Loch Ness that made this eel condition particularly prevalent, therefore. Perhaps this would be something to do with the loch’s size, and location – most of the best lake monsters appear in large, northern lakes; a bizarre correlation, unless, perhaps, there is something about such lakes that promotes the condition of sterility in eels.

This seems to me the neatest solution to the problem of the Loch Ness Monster’s identity. Were it ever to be confirmed, no doubt many people would be disappointed to learn that Nessie was not a monster of prehistory. But we’d still have an unknown lake condition that makes a few eels grow 30 feet long. And that is very nearly as exciting, to me.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under The Kessen Run. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.