mundane. we found 13 species of fish, things like salmon and trout and various other things, and we tested a variety of hypothesis that had been put forward to explain the loch ness monster. obviously the reptile is an extinct creature, but we have a good guess of where in the tree of life that sequence would sit, and we didn t find anything that looked remotely like that. we didn t find reptilian dna there, which is quite hard to find. we found quite a lot of eel dna. whether it was just ordinary eels, whether they were giant, hard to know. there s stories of people seeing
eel-like creatures, 20 or 30 feet in length. in the 80s, there are stories of it being clogged up with eels as thick as a man s thigh. no samples, no photos or physical evidence that s ever been accumulated for the loch ness monster. eek logically it is actually a deep, dark lake. it s not productive. there isn t a lot of food. back in the 70s people made calculations that suggested if there was such a creature, a giant marine reptile, you might be able to keep about 20 of them based on all the food that s available there. that is unlikely to create a viable population. well, still the fascination exists, doesn t it? enough to still lure a whole lot of creature hunters, that s what they re calling themselves, to loch ness this weekend. professor, thank you so much. appreciate it. thank you so much.
creature hunters from around the world are watching closely this weekend as the biggest hunt for the loch ness monster in 50 years gets under way. about 100 volunteers will be looking out for signs of the creature on the lake. the whole thing is being live streamed. organizers say it is the biggest surface observation since 1972, and even though reports of a creature date back to ancient times, the story gathered momentum after sightings back in the 1930s, and of course there is the infamous picture that some say is the loch ness monster. but that has been debunked. i want to bring in a doctor, a geneticist from new zealand. in 2018 he carried out an extensive survey using environmental dna technology that was featured in loch ness monster: new evidence, on
sort of dna we might find, so the basic idea was nessy was a biological creature and there would be traces of its passing in the water, if it s a large creature, presumably leaving large amounts of material behind. for example, like whales, we can easily detect whales if we go out and about, sampling along paths that we know they ve crossed. so we were just looking basically for monster dandruff, but more importantly, we were looking to see what species we could find and describe the bio diversity there. it was really an opportunity to show the environment, and throw a new lens on the world. that search ended up being futu futile? it was all relatively