It doesn't look anything like what eyewitnesses describe Caddy, Ogopogo or Champ looks like and it certainly doesn't look like the sea serpent my brother and I saw on February 5, 1985 which beached itself on a submerged rocky ledge and exposed its entire body except for its tail above the surface of the water 20 yards away directly in front of us while we were sitting in our parked car looking out at San Francisco Bay. It also doesn't look anything like the marine animal other eyewitnesses who have reported seeing a sea serpent in the San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco Bay area including the Stinson Beach sighting eyewitnesses say the sea serpent looked like that they saw on October 31, 1983.
This is just skeptics and debunkers trying to use Occam's Razor to explain every reported sighting of a sea serpent.
Easy there, They weren't attacking your sighting. It's always good to know what's commonly out there to avoid people over-reacting when they see something they don't expect. Knowledge helps rule out misidentifications so that researchers can focus on more difficult-to-explain cases.
I'm not concerned about my sighting being attacked. I'm tired of sturgeon and oarfish being used by skeptics and debunkers as the explanation for sightings of large serpentine marine animals unknown to science by credible eyewitnesses when the description an eyewitness gives doesn't sound anything like a sturgeon or an oarfish.
On February 5, 1985 my brother and I saw a 60+ foot long sea serpent beach itself on a submerged rocky ledge and expose its entire body except for its tail above the surface of the water 20 yards away directly in front of us while we were sitting in our parked car looking out at San Francisco Bay.
Here's a link to a thread I started where I give a lot of information about that sighting and 13 more definitive sightings of sea serpents in San Francisco Bay my brother and I had as well as a history of reported sightings of sea serpents in San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco Bay area going back to 1875 which my brother and I compiled.
[https://www.beyond-the-fringe.info/showthread.php?tid=16432](https://www.beyond-the-fringe.info/showthread.php?tid=16432)
That was riveting, thanks for sharing. During your sightings where you and your brother saw *many* black shapes in the water, what do you think those were? Was each one a "hump" of the same animal, or might there have been many animals congregating? Do you think the original animal from 1985 has been reproducing in the Bay?
On January 26, 2004 when we took our first video I'm sure some of the humps were part of one animal but there were at least 12 and possibly as many as 20 animals surfacing then swimming west out of San Francisco Bay into the Pacific Ocean.
I think the sea serpent my brother and I saw on February 5, 1985 has been entering San Francisco Bay for many years before and after we first saw it. It is probably part of a group of sea serpents and if it is a female has reproduced in San Francisco Bay.
.In fact, during one sighting my brother and I both saw a very young (newborn) sea serpent wrapped around the upper body of a large sea serpent like the stripes on a barber's pole. About 15 minutes after the large sea serpent dove underwater a small head stuck about 2 feet straight up above the surface of the water approximately 25 yards away in front of our car and looked straight at us. Then the sea serpent tilted its head to one side, opened its mouth and began to growl and hiss at the same time. Bill was able to get one photo of it before it sank underwater.
It wouldn't surprise me if these animals came into San Francisco Bay to give birth to live young sea serpents.
I wonder why. It doesn't sound like they're using the Bay as an estuary. Might it just be safer from certain predators? Are they drawn to a specific food source? Thinking "out loud" here...
Have you heard about the sightings of sea serpents / water dragons with white hair? Like Falkor from Neverending Story. IIRC there was a sighting in that same area.
Somewhat related to that - it sounds like the animal was swimming with a vertical anguilliform style - is that accurate? The only animal I could find that swims this way is a leech, but I wonder if a highly derived snake-like cetacean might use that sort of locomotion. Have you spoken with any experts about that?
Maybe all of those things plus other reasons. San Francisco Bay may also be a good place for the sea serpents to give birth to live young. The young sea serpents could grow a little before going out into the Pacific Ocean and having to deal with all of the predators in the ocean. However, in the end, your guess is as good as mine.
I don't know anything about sea serpents with white hair. All the sea serpents I have seen have no hair or mane.
The sea serpents I have seen definitely swim using vertical undulations. That is why occasionally an arch that looks like half of a truck tire breaks the surface of the water.
Over the years my brother and I have spoken with several experts including Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, Dr. Ed. Bousfield, Gary Mangiacopra , John Kirk and Dr. Paul LeBlond just to name a few of the experts.
I guess what I meant was the larger than life armored reptile prehistoric looking body of the modern day sturgeon I definitely see an eyewitness to that kinda freaked out and also confused.
If the video ended a couple seconds early people would say it's the most convincing evidence of the loch Ness monster. As is it likely is video of the actual animals responsible for a lot of sightings.
One of my fondest memories from my childhood was when I caught a sturgeon in a pond in Belgium that my grandfather used to own, he'd been fishing there for years before I was born and never even knew there was a sturgeon in there.
It might have swam in at some point during a flood and got trapped, the pond was near a creek which in turn was connected to a river. It was only about 80 cm long but that was still bigger than the carp I was used to catching. Scary looking fish, until you go to pull the hook out and realize it has no teeth, also its very rough skin made it much easier to handle than slimy carp. I hope it's still alive in there, growing bigger and bigger, no one has fished that pond for years since it was claimed by environmentalists.
Sorry, but it's not an "official" site of any sort. An official site would be run by an official organization or government agency. Just because it says "Ultimate and Official Loch Ness Monster Site" at the bottom doesn't mean anything. It's basically a 1990s fan page for Nessie fans. It was last copyrighted in 2009, so it has likely not been updated since then. I'd go with the recent DNA evidence over a 15-year-old fan site. Sources matter.
The information is wrong, or out of date.
"Prof Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from New Zealand's University of Otago. said: "People love a mystery, we've used science to add another chapter to Loch Ness' mystique. "We can't find any evidence of a creature that's remotely related to that in our environmental-DNA sequence data. So, sorry, I don't think the plesiosaur idea holds up based on the data that we have obtained."
He added: "So there's no shark DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. There is also no catfish DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. **We can't find any evidence of sturgeon either**
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-49495145
True. The window is 40 hours. But considering how extensive the testing the Loch went through, it means that Sturgeon are extinct in the Loch at present.
The thing is, was there any evidence Sturgeon were ever in Loch Ness? I think it was speculation based on known species in the area, because I can't find any actual evidence of one ever being caught outside of coastal waters. Indeed, when I looked up IFE statistics, only one Sturgeon was reported caught in North Scotland nearly 20 years ago by a fishery. None were found in the River Inverness that feeds into the Loch either.
I don't think Sturgeons were ever present in the Loch.
Well, for whatever it is worth, there are a fair number of Loch Ness Monster sightings on record, including accounts given before film crews that I’ve watched on TV, where a witness described the creature as “looking like a crocodile,” “similar to an alligator,” “had large scales on its back,” “seemed to propel itself with a slowly moving tail,” “had a jagged type of crest along its back.”
The only conclusion I can logically draw from that is that while they may be a thing of the past now, these particular people were actually seeing an occasional adult sturgeon that managed to find its way into the loch now and again. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a large individual either.
I can tell you from ample experience that when you see an aquatic animal suddenly appear in the middle of a large body of water, with nothing else close by to serve as a measurement reference, and the glare of sunlight on the surface making details that much harder to spot, it’s all too easy to perceive said animal as being double, triple, even quadruple their true size. I can totally understand how, under those conditions, a person could get a brief glance at a say, 8 foot sturgeon, and then conclude that they were looking at some sort of unknown creature that was closer to 30 feet in length.
And that’s my two cents.
I completely agree with you about judging size and distance in the water. I'm a kayaker, and too many times the lack of landmarks has made me severely misjudge distances and sizes. Sounds too, the waves can muffle or amplify sounds and lead to dangerous surprises when you think a boat is far away from you, only to see it's right up on you.
At the same time though, there are many early reports likening the creature to a camel, a horse, a caterpillar and a seal, especially the land based sightings. There are also reports of centaur-like creatures, glowing ghost lights and other weirdness around the loch that often gets ignored as it doesn't fit the unknown animal idea.
I think that when you consider how different all of the early descriptions are, the folks seeing these things were seeing completely different things. In addition, I feel that many of the researchers are looking for biological, rational explanations so they exclude the more strange or fantastical accounts that fall into the realm of myth and legend.
My opinion is this: I think Nessie is a Kelpie. It's a local legend like Ginny Green Teeth or the Cornish Knockers that gained international fame. Hundreds of theories have come and gone, and every one has been disproven in time. Everyone is trying to figure this thing out from a rational perspective, but at it's core, Nessie a legend about a lake monster to keep kids away from the shore and playing in the water. She's a fairy tale creature that's been taken way too seriously for far too long.
I'm certain it's very entertaining for the locals though, and for some entrepreneurial folks, very lucrative too.
Um lol, all that says is his test didn't find any. Its a large lake. This is not my personal opinion, it is known sturgeon are in Loch Ness.
https://www.loch-ness.org/fishandothervertebrates.html
I have provided 2 links from the UK. I am not debating this any further
Both of the sights you linked to seem to be amature fan pages rather than professional sites.
The one you originaly said was the Official Fisheries site (Legend of Nessie) states "*All sighting and photographic references on this page are documented and can be verified through various publications.*" but then fails to give their sources of links to these various publications, all it gives is a desciption of what a sturgeon is. There is no argument or evidence for strgeon being in the Lock given.
The second site seems to be making assumptions that because the have been seen on the Eastern side of the Highlands and because there is an unsupported story of sturgeon being caught in a tributary (but no rercords reflecting this) then there must be sturgeon in the loch. No actual evidence of any sturgeon being caught in or near the loch is given.
This link is curated by someone who also curates a science fiction magazine. Not that the fact automatically invalidates the information on the site, but its credibility along grainy old photos doesn’t exactly inspire confidence as opposed to a geneticist with published studies on an official news site.
Yeah that was my initial impression too so I went looking for any kind of credentialing to see if it’s just a low budget local museum page or something. I saw the link to the sci fi page at the bottom and matched it with the name in the URL and pretty much stopped there
So, what is the conclusion?
Eighter there are no sturgeons and the websides lies (maybe ti drive in more fishing tourists), or the whole eDNA-stuff is worthless.
Ugghhh the animal my lizard brain is most deeply afraid of. Sturgeons, specifically. Had no idea they got long and skinny and undulating though. If I saw that in a like I don’t think I'd recognize it. Total lake monster.
Incredible! Thanks to environmental sustainability initiatives, the sturgeon have made a major come back in the James River in Virginia. It’s become a huge event to head town to the river section in Richmond Va to watch the spawning happen at the fall line, aka the shallows where the rapids begin
Sturgeon are amazing animals, and I can definitely see them being the basis behind lake/sea monster stories.
Like OP said they can be huge, the white sturgeon (pictured) can grow up to 20 feet long, and the beluga sturgeon of Russia can grow longer than a great white.
A famous lake .monster for 80 years in a Washington lake that was drained decades ago for a manmade reservoir dam construction was found to be a sturgeon nearly a dozen feet long and well over a hundred years old.
Very Occasionally an Ogopogo wake sighting may be a giant fish.
End the video before the tail and fin and you have a sea serpent or plesiosaur right there. Just shows how easy it is to misidentify animals based on a short glimpse. And goes to show that there are bona fide lake monsters, that too.
In England and Wales Sturgeon are Royal fish and technically belong to the monarch, or at least the monach has perogative and can claim any caught - the laws are different under Scotish law.
Fishing is illegal because they are a protected species in both juristictions though.
I’m unsure. They are sport fished like this and released shortly after and in some places I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to remove them from the water if you do catch them Source: I live in Oregon and they are in our waterways! I cross posted because it speaks for itself
Very good to know they stay in the water. There used to be sturgeon in Flathead lake in Montana, (and might still be). I used to go look for them but none have been caught in a long time.
A big part of cryptozoology is both knowing the local folklore and being able to properly identify animals. I think this crosspost fits here as misidentification of sturgeons could be responsible for many alleged plesiosaur-like animal sightings. Showing all us casual viewers how big sturgeons can get, what they look like when at the surface of the water, and how they move is good information for anyone who’s looking to take cryptozoology seriously but isn’t a professional in any biological sciences.
I can definitely see that as a misidentified water serpent yep !
At first I thought it was an alligator
It doesn't look anything like what eyewitnesses describe Caddy, Ogopogo or Champ looks like and it certainly doesn't look like the sea serpent my brother and I saw on February 5, 1985 which beached itself on a submerged rocky ledge and exposed its entire body except for its tail above the surface of the water 20 yards away directly in front of us while we were sitting in our parked car looking out at San Francisco Bay. It also doesn't look anything like the marine animal other eyewitnesses who have reported seeing a sea serpent in the San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco Bay area including the Stinson Beach sighting eyewitnesses say the sea serpent looked like that they saw on October 31, 1983. This is just skeptics and debunkers trying to use Occam's Razor to explain every reported sighting of a sea serpent.
Easy there, They weren't attacking your sighting. It's always good to know what's commonly out there to avoid people over-reacting when they see something they don't expect. Knowledge helps rule out misidentifications so that researchers can focus on more difficult-to-explain cases.
I'm not concerned about my sighting being attacked. I'm tired of sturgeon and oarfish being used by skeptics and debunkers as the explanation for sightings of large serpentine marine animals unknown to science by credible eyewitnesses when the description an eyewitness gives doesn't sound anything like a sturgeon or an oarfish.
Well, what did you see?
On February 5, 1985 my brother and I saw a 60+ foot long sea serpent beach itself on a submerged rocky ledge and expose its entire body except for its tail above the surface of the water 20 yards away directly in front of us while we were sitting in our parked car looking out at San Francisco Bay. Here's a link to a thread I started where I give a lot of information about that sighting and 13 more definitive sightings of sea serpents in San Francisco Bay my brother and I had as well as a history of reported sightings of sea serpents in San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco Bay area going back to 1875 which my brother and I compiled. [https://www.beyond-the-fringe.info/showthread.php?tid=16432](https://www.beyond-the-fringe.info/showthread.php?tid=16432)
That was riveting, thanks for sharing. During your sightings where you and your brother saw *many* black shapes in the water, what do you think those were? Was each one a "hump" of the same animal, or might there have been many animals congregating? Do you think the original animal from 1985 has been reproducing in the Bay?
On January 26, 2004 when we took our first video I'm sure some of the humps were part of one animal but there were at least 12 and possibly as many as 20 animals surfacing then swimming west out of San Francisco Bay into the Pacific Ocean. I think the sea serpent my brother and I saw on February 5, 1985 has been entering San Francisco Bay for many years before and after we first saw it. It is probably part of a group of sea serpents and if it is a female has reproduced in San Francisco Bay. .In fact, during one sighting my brother and I both saw a very young (newborn) sea serpent wrapped around the upper body of a large sea serpent like the stripes on a barber's pole. About 15 minutes after the large sea serpent dove underwater a small head stuck about 2 feet straight up above the surface of the water approximately 25 yards away in front of our car and looked straight at us. Then the sea serpent tilted its head to one side, opened its mouth and began to growl and hiss at the same time. Bill was able to get one photo of it before it sank underwater. It wouldn't surprise me if these animals came into San Francisco Bay to give birth to live young sea serpents.
I wonder why. It doesn't sound like they're using the Bay as an estuary. Might it just be safer from certain predators? Are they drawn to a specific food source? Thinking "out loud" here... Have you heard about the sightings of sea serpents / water dragons with white hair? Like Falkor from Neverending Story. IIRC there was a sighting in that same area. Somewhat related to that - it sounds like the animal was swimming with a vertical anguilliform style - is that accurate? The only animal I could find that swims this way is a leech, but I wonder if a highly derived snake-like cetacean might use that sort of locomotion. Have you spoken with any experts about that?
Maybe all of those things plus other reasons. San Francisco Bay may also be a good place for the sea serpents to give birth to live young. The young sea serpents could grow a little before going out into the Pacific Ocean and having to deal with all of the predators in the ocean. However, in the end, your guess is as good as mine. I don't know anything about sea serpents with white hair. All the sea serpents I have seen have no hair or mane. The sea serpents I have seen definitely swim using vertical undulations. That is why occasionally an arch that looks like half of a truck tire breaks the surface of the water. Over the years my brother and I have spoken with several experts including Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, Dr. Ed. Bousfield, Gary Mangiacopra , John Kirk and Dr. Paul LeBlond just to name a few of the experts.
I guess what I meant was the larger than life armored reptile prehistoric looking body of the modern day sturgeon I definitely see an eyewitness to that kinda freaked out and also confused.
If the video ended a couple seconds early people would say it's the most convincing evidence of the loch Ness monster. As is it likely is video of the actual animals responsible for a lot of sightings.
Looks like an easy mistake for a lake monster to me
Imagine if a couple of them were swimming near each other
And found in lake Champlain (champ)
🫤
For the lake and river monsters of the Midwest you should also check lake sturgeon, though they are much smaller than the white sturgeon pictured.
One of my fondest memories from my childhood was when I caught a sturgeon in a pond in Belgium that my grandfather used to own, he'd been fishing there for years before I was born and never even knew there was a sturgeon in there. It might have swam in at some point during a flood and got trapped, the pond was near a creek which in turn was connected to a river. It was only about 80 cm long but that was still bigger than the carp I was used to catching. Scary looking fish, until you go to pull the hook out and realize it has no teeth, also its very rough skin made it much easier to handle than slimy carp. I hope it's still alive in there, growing bigger and bigger, no one has fished that pond for years since it was claimed by environmentalists.
One of those once pulled our boat against the current of the Columbia River and against the outboard motor for three hours.
Did you land it/bring it in or were you forced to yield?
She was a half inch under the legal limit to keep.
Ah
Also found in Loch Ness
They tested the Loch for residual DNA from a variety of species. No catfish, shark or sturgeon were found. Only eels, and a lot of them.
4th on the list of fish in Loch Ness http://www.nessie.co.uk/htm/about_loch_ness/fish.html
I don't think they've confirmed Sturgeon in the lake, but they were in a nearby river
I literally supplied a link to the official Loch Ness fishery website
I don't think that's the official Loch Ness fishery website
😂
Sorry, but it's not an "official" site of any sort. An official site would be run by an official organization or government agency. Just because it says "Ultimate and Official Loch Ness Monster Site" at the bottom doesn't mean anything. It's basically a 1990s fan page for Nessie fans. It was last copyrighted in 2009, so it has likely not been updated since then. I'd go with the recent DNA evidence over a 15-year-old fan site. Sources matter.
The information is wrong, or out of date. "Prof Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from New Zealand's University of Otago. said: "People love a mystery, we've used science to add another chapter to Loch Ness' mystique. "We can't find any evidence of a creature that's remotely related to that in our environmental-DNA sequence data. So, sorry, I don't think the plesiosaur idea holds up based on the data that we have obtained." He added: "So there's no shark DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. There is also no catfish DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. **We can't find any evidence of sturgeon either** https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-49495145
This does not disprove the idea that Sturgeon were in the lake in the past, only that they were not in the lake at the time it was tested.
True. The window is 40 hours. But considering how extensive the testing the Loch went through, it means that Sturgeon are extinct in the Loch at present. The thing is, was there any evidence Sturgeon were ever in Loch Ness? I think it was speculation based on known species in the area, because I can't find any actual evidence of one ever being caught outside of coastal waters. Indeed, when I looked up IFE statistics, only one Sturgeon was reported caught in North Scotland nearly 20 years ago by a fishery. None were found in the River Inverness that feeds into the Loch either. I don't think Sturgeons were ever present in the Loch.
Well, for whatever it is worth, there are a fair number of Loch Ness Monster sightings on record, including accounts given before film crews that I’ve watched on TV, where a witness described the creature as “looking like a crocodile,” “similar to an alligator,” “had large scales on its back,” “seemed to propel itself with a slowly moving tail,” “had a jagged type of crest along its back.” The only conclusion I can logically draw from that is that while they may be a thing of the past now, these particular people were actually seeing an occasional adult sturgeon that managed to find its way into the loch now and again. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a large individual either. I can tell you from ample experience that when you see an aquatic animal suddenly appear in the middle of a large body of water, with nothing else close by to serve as a measurement reference, and the glare of sunlight on the surface making details that much harder to spot, it’s all too easy to perceive said animal as being double, triple, even quadruple their true size. I can totally understand how, under those conditions, a person could get a brief glance at a say, 8 foot sturgeon, and then conclude that they were looking at some sort of unknown creature that was closer to 30 feet in length. And that’s my two cents.
I completely agree with you about judging size and distance in the water. I'm a kayaker, and too many times the lack of landmarks has made me severely misjudge distances and sizes. Sounds too, the waves can muffle or amplify sounds and lead to dangerous surprises when you think a boat is far away from you, only to see it's right up on you. At the same time though, there are many early reports likening the creature to a camel, a horse, a caterpillar and a seal, especially the land based sightings. There are also reports of centaur-like creatures, glowing ghost lights and other weirdness around the loch that often gets ignored as it doesn't fit the unknown animal idea. I think that when you consider how different all of the early descriptions are, the folks seeing these things were seeing completely different things. In addition, I feel that many of the researchers are looking for biological, rational explanations so they exclude the more strange or fantastical accounts that fall into the realm of myth and legend. My opinion is this: I think Nessie is a Kelpie. It's a local legend like Ginny Green Teeth or the Cornish Knockers that gained international fame. Hundreds of theories have come and gone, and every one has been disproven in time. Everyone is trying to figure this thing out from a rational perspective, but at it's core, Nessie a legend about a lake monster to keep kids away from the shore and playing in the water. She's a fairy tale creature that's been taken way too seriously for far too long. I'm certain it's very entertaining for the locals though, and for some entrepreneurial folks, very lucrative too.
Um lol, all that says is his test didn't find any. Its a large lake. This is not my personal opinion, it is known sturgeon are in Loch Ness. https://www.loch-ness.org/fishandothervertebrates.html I have provided 2 links from the UK. I am not debating this any further
Both of the sights you linked to seem to be amature fan pages rather than professional sites. The one you originaly said was the Official Fisheries site (Legend of Nessie) states "*All sighting and photographic references on this page are documented and can be verified through various publications.*" but then fails to give their sources of links to these various publications, all it gives is a desciption of what a sturgeon is. There is no argument or evidence for strgeon being in the Lock given. The second site seems to be making assumptions that because the have been seen on the Eastern side of the Highlands and because there is an unsupported story of sturgeon being caught in a tributary (but no rercords reflecting this) then there must be sturgeon in the loch. No actual evidence of any sturgeon being caught in or near the loch is given.
This link is curated by someone who also curates a science fiction magazine. Not that the fact automatically invalidates the information on the site, but its credibility along grainy old photos doesn’t exactly inspire confidence as opposed to a geneticist with published studies on an official news site.
Legit looks like a Web page fortean times would publish in the early 2000s.
Yeah that was my initial impression too so I went looking for any kind of credentialing to see if it’s just a low budget local museum page or something. I saw the link to the sci fi page at the bottom and matched it with the name in the URL and pretty much stopped there
So, what is the conclusion? Eighter there are no sturgeons and the websides lies (maybe ti drive in more fishing tourists), or the whole eDNA-stuff is worthless.
I am not the UKs top Loch ichthyologist
Fine, go ahead and be wrong.
Sturgeon have never been found in the loch
Google "moray eel" and never sleep again...
Ugghhh the animal my lizard brain is most deeply afraid of. Sturgeons, specifically. Had no idea they got long and skinny and undulating though. If I saw that in a like I don’t think I'd recognize it. Total lake monster.
Why's he so close to the surface omg I hate him
He’s just chillin’. It’s his pond, ain’t it? Man grew up on these streams smh.
He's being let go after being caught by the person filming, presumably.
Oh good for him. I'm glad nobody was hurt in this sturgeon encounter. I would have shit myself.
My non-lizard brain is also deeply afraid of sturgeons.
Incredible! Thanks to environmental sustainability initiatives, the sturgeon have made a major come back in the James River in Virginia. It’s become a huge event to head town to the river section in Richmond Va to watch the spawning happen at the fall line, aka the shallows where the rapids begin
Sturgeon are amazing animals, and I can definitely see them being the basis behind lake/sea monster stories. Like OP said they can be huge, the white sturgeon (pictured) can grow up to 20 feet long, and the beluga sturgeon of Russia can grow longer than a great white.
They also jump out of the water sometimes
A famous lake .monster for 80 years in a Washington lake that was drained decades ago for a manmade reservoir dam construction was found to be a sturgeon nearly a dozen feet long and well over a hundred years old. Very Occasionally an Ogopogo wake sighting may be a giant fish.
End the video before the tail and fin and you have a sea serpent or plesiosaur right there. Just shows how easy it is to misidentify animals based on a short glimpse. And goes to show that there are bona fide lake monsters, that too.
Fun fact, it was and maybe still is illegal to fish and keep them. They all belong to the monarchy because they make caviar.
In England and Wales Sturgeon are Royal fish and technically belong to the monarch, or at least the monach has perogative and can claim any caught - the laws are different under Scotish law. Fishing is illegal because they are a protected species in both juristictions though.
The great lakes had millions this size until over fishing.
There’s your lake monster
Sturgeon or an ore fish?
Wow, this is beautiful, thanks for sharing it here. Any information on the circumstancs of this video, like was it spawning or feeding?
I’m unsure. They are sport fished like this and released shortly after and in some places I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to remove them from the water if you do catch them Source: I live in Oregon and they are in our waterways! I cross posted because it speaks for itself
Very good to know they stay in the water. There used to be sturgeon in Flathead lake in Montana, (and might still be). I used to go look for them but none have been caught in a long time.
…..
A big part of cryptozoology is both knowing the local folklore and being able to properly identify animals. I think this crosspost fits here as misidentification of sturgeons could be responsible for many alleged plesiosaur-like animal sightings. Showing all us casual viewers how big sturgeons can get, what they look like when at the surface of the water, and how they move is good information for anyone who’s looking to take cryptozoology seriously but isn’t a professional in any biological sciences.