Summary: <p>This week we investigate a couple of famous lake monsters, Nessie and Champ. Don’t worry, there are more lake monster and sea monster episodes coming in the future!</p> <p>Most lake monster pictures look like this. Compelling! This was taken in Loch Ness:</p> <p><img class="size-medium wp-image-281" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/39F5E14200000578-0-image-a-10_1478024083719-300x190.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="190"></p> <p>The famous Mansi photograph taken in Lake Champlain:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-280" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Champ2-300x225-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225"></p> <p>Beluga whales are really easy to spot. Look, this one has a soccer ball!</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-282" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Pictures-of-Beluga-Whales-300x210.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="210"></p> <p>Further reading:</p> <p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hunting-Monsters-Cryptozoology-Reality-Behind-ebook/dp/B01B867JTO">Hunting Monsters</a> by Darren Naish</p> <p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Abominable-Science-Origins-Nessie-Cryptids-ebook/dp/B00BAHA5F2/ref=pd_sim_351_5/144-0679528-8763766?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=J9HAJVGER9DHA54ZSNG0">Abominable Science!</a> by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero</p> <p>Show transcript:</p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>Back in March, we released an episode about sea monsters. For a long time it was our second most downloaded show, behind the ivory-billed woodpecker, although the jellyfish and shark episodes have taken over the top spots lately. I always intended to follow up with an episode on lake monsters, so here it is.</p> <p>Let me just say going in that I think most lake monster sightings are not of unknown animals. On the other hand, I also firmly believe there are plenty of unknown animals in lakes—but they’re probably not very big, probably not all that exciting to the average person, and probably not deserving of the name monster. But who knows? I’d love to be proven wrong. Let’s take a look at what people are seeing out there.</p> <p>One of the biggest names in cryptids is Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. She and Bigfoot are the superstars of cryptozoology. But despite almost a century of close scrutiny of Loch Ness, we still have no proof she exists.</p> <p>Loch Ness is the biggest of a chain of long, narrow, steep-sided lakes and shallow rivers that cut Scotland right in two along a fault line. Loch Ness is 22 miles long with a maximum depth of 754 feet, the biggest lake in all of the UK, not just Scotland. It’s 50 feet above sea level and was carved out by glaciers. During the Pleistocene, Scotland was completely covered with ice half a mile deep until about 18,000 years ago. And before you ask, plesiosaurs disappeared from the fossil record 66 million years ago.</p> <p>Loch Ness isn’t a remote, hard to find place. All the lochs and their rivers have made up a busy shipping channel since the Caledonian Canal made them more navigable with a series of locks and canals in 1822, but the area around Loch Ness was well populated and busy for centuries before that. Loch Ness has long been a popular tourist destination, well before the Nessie sightings started. There have been stories of strange creatures in Loch Ness and all the lo</p>
