An expert who has spent 50 years probing the Nessie phenomenon has delivered his devastating verdict on the monster – that people are actually seeing swans.
Naturalist Adrian Shine said people spotting ‘long-necked’ creatures on Loch Ness were actually misidentifying waterbirds in calm conditions.
While mysterious humps or loops in the water were really just boat wakes, he said, which are the ‘largest cause of monster sightings’.
He added that the Nessie of popular imagination was simply the classic sea serpent depicted on old maps in a new inland setting.
Mr Shine, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and founder of the Loch Ness Project, says he is a ‘sympathetic sceptic’ when it comes to the monster.
But he offered few comforts to those who believe Nessie is real.
He said: ‘Boat wakes are probably the number one cause of monsters sightings, and waterbirds are the long-necked ones.’
He continued: ‘Of course there are long-necked creatures on Loch Ness – we call them swans.
‘And in calm conditions you can lose your ability to judge distance, and if you can’t judge distance, you can’t judge size.’
He’s not the only one to notice the resemblance either.
Finnish photographer Tommi Vainionpää edited together a convincing likeness of Nessie using images of different parts of a swan, captured in silhouette.
Other waterbirds mistaken for the monster included cormorants and mergansers, Mr Shine said.
The naturalist, who still lives by the loch near Drumnadrochit, also described how boat wakes could form the classic Nessie ‘humps’.
He said: ‘When a vessel is coming towards you, it is obvious what the wake is – you see it spreading out from the sides of the vessel approaching you, or indeed going away from you.
‘But if it’s going across your front, it’s quite different – you see the individual wave train, the individual wavelengths, as solid black humps.
‘They will be short and many for a vessel moving slowly, and they will be longer and fewer as the vessel gathers speed.
‘The wave lines can be almost continuous, and it is a fascinating illusion. It is very compelling.’
In his new book, A Natural History of Sea Serpents, Mr Shine probes how the sea serpent of nautical lore was reborn in Loch Ness.
He said: ‘You cannot talk about Nessies as a single phenomenon – it is derived directly from the sea serpents controversy.
‘The way that it is perceived… the two forms – the multi-humper and the long necker – are exactly where the 19th century debate got to with sea serpents.
‘We know what sea serpents look like, you do, I do, everybody else does – and the things people see now in Loch Ness will confirm that.
‘People will continue to come forward having seen things unrecognised by them, and which will inevitably confirm the stereotypes that society has – it is called confirmation bias.’
As for whether any other species might be responsible for Nessie sightings, Mr Shine characterised the other candidates as a ‘basket of fish’ – sturgeon, catfish and giant eels.
But a 2018 survey of the DNA in Loch Ness couldn’t find any trace of the first two, while the eel DNA discovered could have come from eels of any size.
The naturalist added that there simply wasn’t enough food in the loch for a hypothetical monster to survive anyway.
As evidence he cited the 10% rule, which stipulates that only a tenth of the energy in any level of the food chain will be passed to the next.
He said: ‘We’ve measured the population of open-water fish acoustically, and we reckon it’s about 20 tonnes.
‘And so if you’ve got 20 metric tonnes of fish, then you could only have two tons of monster. That’d be about half the weight of a basking shark.
‘You see the orders of magnitude that we’ve got to, and they’re very low.’
In any case, Mr Shine believes the debate about Nessie will prove more enduring than the question of sea monsters in the world’s oceans.
He said: ‘The sea is too big for people to really argue about, whereas the loch represents a finite environment, more amenable to resolution.’
He continued: ‘Yes, the loch is quite deep, it’s quite big – there’s more water in it than in the whole of England and Wales, but it’s still relatively small place.
‘It is finite, and therefore the answer seems not to be too far away. That’s why it lends itself to popular curiosity.’
A Natural History of Sea Serpents is available from Amazon or Whittles Publishing directly, priced at £18.99.
What IS the Loch Ness Monster?
Rumours of a strange creature living in the waters of Loch Ness have abounded over the decades, yet scant evidence has been found to back up these claims.
One of the first sightings, believed to have fuelled modern Nessie fever, came in May 2, 1933.
On this date the Inverness Courier carried a story about a local couple who claim to have seen ‘an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface’.
Another famous claimed sighting is a photograph taken in 1934 by Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson.
It was later exposed as a hoax by one of the participants, Chris Spurling, who, on his deathbed, revealed that the pictures were staged.
Other sightings James Gray’s picture from 2001 when he and friend Peter Levings were out fishing on the Loch, while namesake Hugh Gray’s blurred photo of what appears to be a large sea creature was published in the Daily Express in 1933.
The first reported sighting of the monster is said to have been made in AD565 by the Irish missionary St Columba when he came across a giant beast in the River Ness.
But no one has ever come up with a satisfactory explanation for the sightings – although in 2019, ‘Nessie expert’ Steve Feltham, who has spent 24 years watching the Loch, said he thought it was actually a giant Wels Catfish, native to waters near the Baltic and Caspian seas in Europe.
An online register lists more than 1,000 total Nessie sightings, created by Mr Campbell, the man behind the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club and is available at www.lochnesssightings.com.
So what could explain these mysterious sightings?
Many Nessie witnesses have mentioned large, crocodile-like scutes sitting atop the spine of the creature, leading some to believe an escaped amphibian may be to blame.
Native fish sturgeons can also weigh several hundred pounds and have ridged backs, which make them look almost reptilian.
Some believe Nessie is a long-necked plesiosaur – like an elasmosaur – that survived somehow when all the other dinosaurs were wiped out.
Others say the sightings are down to Scottish pines dying and flopping into the loch, before quickly becoming water-logged and sinking.
While submerged, botanical chemicals start trapping tiny bubbles of air.
Eventually, enough of these are gathered to propel the log upward as deep pressures begin altering its shape, giving the appearance of an animal coming up for air.
