I am thinking this through, I am willing to be argued out of this position.
You know those Chinese jumping catfish (CJC) that is coming up the Mississippi? I read someplace a few months ago that CJC DNA has been found in the Great Lakes. That is to say we can now detect an animal in a body of water by just looking for its DNA in the water. Cool!
Even if Nessie is a deep-water animal with a very small population, it is impossible to imagine that its DNA is not in every bit of mud in that loch.
Further, the cost of DNA testing is crashing. Soon we will be able to use this technology in silly projects, projects like looking for unknown species in Scottish lochs.
Soon there will no possible explanation of Nessie as an unknown animal.
Easy. You just compare it to the DNA of its family members found in other large bodies of water around the world.
Can they do this on land too? My family owns 600 acres on river bottom land in Louisiana that is home to the dreaded goat man (half man, half goat). Bunches of people have heard him while hunting and a few have even seen him. He must be getting old now because I don’t think there is a goat woman to make kids with. I know the general area where to look for his DNA and it should be easy to identify.
Loch Ness is not one of the Great Lakes, and is similar only in the fact that it is another large, fresh-water lake. I doubt that techniques developed for detecting *invasive *alien species in the Great Lakes can successfully be applied to detecting a *native *species in the loch.
I presume to look for catfish you look for a sequence in DNA known to be unique to catfish. I don’t think you could use the same technique to test for “unidentifiable DNA”. I guess you could work backwards and prove that a given sample isn’t from an organism known to be native to the loch, but given the number of such organisms, I doubt that would be feasable with the amount of funds and resources that are available for mythical monster studies.
Plus, if you do find “unknown DNA” in the loch, that doesn’t really prove much other then that scientists don’t have a complete catalog of the creatures that inhabit the area. Seems as likely to be an invasive snail from Russia as a hidden seamonster.
That’s not how it works. There are different methods of profiling DNA to classify it, but all of them look for and expand specific markers in the DNA chain to match them with a known genetic profile. There is a lot of garbage DNA that isn’t classified because it isn’t useful, and in fact there are large numbers of alleles that are shared across species and even genera. So finding “unidentified DNA” is the rule rather than the exception and doesn’t generally let you rule out anything.
Do people really believe in the Loch Ness monster? I thought it was just a charming local folktale. I mean I know people have fun going through the motions and all, but surely no one believes there’s actually a sea monster in Loch Ness.
Dude, there are people who seriously [thread=395683]still believe[/thread] [thread=477926]in Bigfoot[/thread] despite a complete lack of any credible substantiating evidence.
*You can knock it,
You can rock it,
You can go to Timbuktu,
But you’ll never find a Nessy in the zoo!
You may see an Anaconda, or Giraffe and Kangaroo,
But you’ll never see a Nessy in a zoo! *
