The Loch Ness Mini-Monster

There’s more to Loch Ness’s ecology than an imaginary plesiosaur

Will this Loch Ness brown trout go ferox? We just don’t know (photo by Paul Greenberg)

Are there really monsters in Loch Ness? It depends on whether you’re a human or a char. The recent “discovery” that plesiosaurs, swimming dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, may have inhabited freshwater lakes is so obviously pseudo science clickbait on par with that old Gen X TV favorite “In Search Of” that I’m hesitant to even mention it. Even if plesiosaurs had once inhabited Scottish lochs, the chances that these coldblooded reptiles could have somehow adapted to a vastly cooler climate over the stretch of 66 million years seems ridiculously sketchy. Really, the Loch Ness monster “rediscovery” is just another distraction that keeps us from looking at the miracle of still-extant wild ecosystems and the species that could be relegated to myth should the present human assault on the climate continue.

It was only when we’d worked our way back our starting point that the rods finally bent. I lunged for the rod hoping that we’d indeed hooked the monster.

That said, there is a kind of monster in Loch Ness that I may or may not have encountered on a fishing trip to the famed lake. To fish Loch Ness one follows the River Ness from Inverness…