Gaby
The creature said to live in Scotland’s Loch Ness keeps fueling debate. Despite many debunkings, Nessie still attracts endless speculation. Recently another plausible explanation surfaced — that the monster might be a giant eel — but researcher Flo Foxon rejects that after a thorough investigation. Foxon argues that the link between folklore and zoology can be tested scientifically and that his research supports that connection.
The Loch Ness Monster entered popular lore in the 1930s, when visitors to the freshwater lake began reporting extraordinary sightings. People nicknamed the creature Nessie and described it as a plesiosaur-like sea serpent. A 1934 photograph by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson showed a long, swan-like neck and looked plesiosaurian; it is now widely regarded as a hoax staged by actor Marmaduke Wetherell.
That finding sparked a new hypothesis — and a prompt refutation. In 2018, New Zealand geneticist Neil Gemmell led an international effort to settle the question. Gemmell and his team collected water samples from Loch Ness and filtered the environmental DNA to build a catalog of species in the lake. As ScienceAlert reported, they found no DNA from sea serpents or plesiosaurs. Instead they detected a large amount of European eel DNA, which makes sense because eels are known inhabitants of the lake. Gemmell’s team concluded that long, serpentine sightings were most likely very large eels. Flo Foxon decided to explore that idea further.
Foxon analyzed data on eel catches in Loch Ness and other European waters to assess how likely it would be to encounter an exceptionally large specimen. For Nessie to match its reported size, an eel would have to be extraordinarily large. In Foxon’s dataset of more than 20,000 eels, the maximum length reached 93 cm. He estimated the physiologically possible maximum size for a European eel at about 1.3 m.
The approximate upper size of Nessie in the surgeon’s photograph is 2.4 m, while the creature’s total body length in that image is about 6.1 m. Foxon therefore concluded that an eel in Loch Ness would be unlikely to create the impression of a gigantic creature. He also calculated that the chance of encountering a one-meter eel is roughly 1 in 50,000 given Loch Ness’ fish stocks. Foxon allows that some sightings of smaller, still-unidentified animals might be large eels, but the likelihood of finding a specimen over 6 m is essentially zero. Eels are therefore unlikely contenders for the role of the mysterious Nessie.
