EXCLUSIVE: Mystery carcass at Fuerteventura

Christian Vincent Jung writes:

In the beginning of 2008 I was on the Island of Fuerteventura as a rep, and one day I and a co-worker went on a trip to the south of the island.

On one beach we found this weird looking cadaver of some animal, that we could not make out what was.

Since then, I have tried to figure it out, with no luck.

Maybe you can help me?

One picture with my co-worker is to show the surroundings, another is a map of the island indicating where we found the animal.

The last three pictures are of the animal.It was pretty big: The backside approx 2x2 times the size of a grown man's hand (Picture 060.jpg), and 6-8 hands long(Picture 059.jpeg).(Sorry for the weird measurements, but I hope it gives the general idea.)

I hope You can solve this little mystery for me :)

My considered opinion is that they are a small cetacean of some sort.

However, I would value a second opinion, and possibly a more detailed identification. The pictures are all credited to Christian by the way.

SUPERSALMON

In October last year the largest Chinook salmon ever found in California washed up dead. The salmon measured over 51 inches and is believed to have died from natural causes before washing up on the banks of Lower Battle Creek, near Red Bluff, California.

Biologist, Doug Killam, said that the fish could have weighed more than the 88 lbs salmon caught in the Sacramento River, which is the largest recorded Chinook salmon in California. The heaviest Chinook salmon ever caught was 126 lbs in Petersburg, Alaska, but most of the salmon biologists have weighed in California are between 20 and 30 lbs.

THE STRANGE STORY OF BARRY THE POLYCHAETE

Don't you just love the English. In the 19th Century an intrepid explorer would travel for years across trackless wastes and impenetrable jungle, and eventually reach their destination: a malaria-infested swamp in the middle of nowhere that they would proudly call `Picadilly`

Now, this is a similar syndrome. At Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium, "something" had been causing havoc in one of their reef tanks. Matt Slater, the aquarium's curator, said:

'Something was guzzling our reef but we had no idea what, we also found an injured Tang Fish so we laid traps but they got ripped apart in the night.

They finally found the culprit: a four foot long tropical polychaete worm which had probably arrived as a juvenile in a shipment of living rock.

'That worm must have obliterated the traps. The bait was full of hooks which he must have just digested.'

Mr Slater said:

'It really does look like something out of a horror movie. It's over four feet long with these bizarre-looking jaws.

We also discovered that he is covered with thousands of bristles which are capable of inflicting a sting resulting in permanent numbness.'

At the risk of sounding like Lloyd Grossman, let's review the evidence:

1. Giant polychaete worm
2. Ugly to the point of something out of H.P.Lovecraft
3. Destroys a whole fishtank and eats fish
4. Can digest fish-hooks
5. Four feet long and probably growing
6. Can deliver a poisonous sting which permanantly numbs the person stung

Do they call itany of the following?

a. Satan
b. Hitler
c. Blair
d. Beelzebub
e. Devilworm
f. Cthullu

No

They call it Barry! Don't you just love the English. It is at times like this that I am so very proud of my race. It is dogged stolidness like this which got us an Empire. Well done lads and lasses! You have made an ageing manic-depressive Imperialist very proud of you.

However, I have another problem. The animal-keeper in me is overwhelmed by complete avarice. I want one!

REDISCOVERED FISHES

When writing these pages I often feel like an old-fashioned harbinger of doom - like one of those
sad old blokes who used to hang around outside Leicester Square Tube Station brandishing a
placard which informed the world that “The End is Nigh!”.

Many fish species that have become extinct within the last few years. Sadly, the list continues to grow each year. But it’s not all doom and gloom; new species are discovered regularly, and species thought to be extinct are also sometimes
rediscovered.

The Dwarf Loach, Chain Botia, or Chain Loach (Yasuhikotakia sidthimunki, formerly Botia
sidthimunki) is a popular freshwater tropical fish in aquariums and belongs to to the Cobitidae family. It grows up to 3in in captivity, and 5in in the wild. It prefers water with temperature 77 to 86F (25 - 30C), pH 6.5 to 6.9 dGH to 8.0. It is omnivorous with diets including live crustaceans, insects, snails, etc. The Dwarf Loach is found in the Mae Klong river and River Kwai, Western Thailand. This species is endangered and is a protected species in Thailand. It was thought to be extinct in the wild until recently rediscovered in Sangkhla Buri.

Algansea barbata, the Lerma chub, is found in the headwaters of the headwaters of the Rio Lerma, Mexico. Algansea barbata was last collected in 1964, and last seen only eight years later, but its extinction was not suggested until 1998. However eight specimens (five males and three
females) of Algansea barbata Alvarez and Cortés, 1964 were caught in a lateral channel to Rio Sila, Tiacaque, Jocotitlán, State of Mexico (19º 40' N and 99º 42' W) in April of 1999. This extends the known range for the species in the State of Mexico toward the most southern population's northeast limit (13 Km to the NE of Ixtlahuaca, on highway 55, NNW of Toluca, State of Mexico) and it is the first record since 1972

The parasitic Miller Lake Lamprey (Lampetra minima) was thought to have gone Extinct in
about 1958. This was as a result of a deliberate chemical treatment of Miller Lake (the only
known location at the time) to exterminate this species to prevent predation on introduced trout fingerlings. However, in 1992, an adult lamprey collected in the Williamson River was identified as L. minima, and, in 1996, unidentified lamprey were collected in Miller Creek, the outflow stream of Miller Lake. Subsequent surveys in the summers of 1997–1999 reconfirmed the species extinction in Miller Lake but lead to the discovery of several subpopulations of L. minima within and outside the Miller Lake sub-basin (Lorion et al. 2000).

The rediscovery of this species was only brought to the attention of the IUCN Red List Programme in 2004. It is provisionally listed as Data Deficient - pending a reassessment of its status.

Formerly thought to be endemic to Miller Lake (16km northeast of Mt. Thielson), Klamath County, Oregon. Recent surveys documented subpopulations in Miller Creek, Jack Creek, and the upper sections of the Williamson and Sycan rivers (Lorion et al. 2000).

In 2002 biologists with Conservation Fisheries, Inc. (CFI), a Knoxville-based non-profit organization, recently found a single specimen of the slender chub while conducting a fish survey in northeast Tennessee. This find is the culmination of years of hitherto-fruitless searching.
"We were ecstatic," said Pat Rakes, co-director of CFI, "It's a wonderful feeling to be out there for so long, searching and searching, and then coming up with something."

The slender chub, a federally protected fish, is known only from the Clinch and Powell Rivers in
northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia. It was last seen in the Clinch River in the mid-
1990s; it hasn't been seen in the Powell River since the early 1980s.

The lone fish, about the length of a human finger, is now in an aquarium at CFI's headquarters,
eating voraciously, while biologists hope to find a mate to begin the propagation process. The biologists at CFI have been key players in efforts to restore the aquatic biodiversity of the
Southern Appalachians. Their Knoxville facility, with its numerous aquariums full of rare and
imperilled fishes, is the site of captive propagation efforts being carried out for numerous fish species.

A rare fish that had not been seen by scientists for over 50 years has been rediscovered in
Auckland, New Zealand. The threatened Black mudfish, Neochanna diversus, is listed on the
current IUCN Redlist for fishes, but hasn't been seen since shortly after the species was originally described in 1949. However, a recent survey of the Te Henga and Tomarata wetlands revealed a population of Neochanna diversus alive and well.

Grant Barnes, Project Leader for Auckland Regional Council's State of Environment monitoring programme says that the new discovery of Neochanna says a lot about the health of the ecosystem. He told the news website Scoop: "Freshwater fish are sensitive to a wide range of environmental impacts such as habitat loss, pollution and sedimentation."

Neochanna diversus is a galaxiid, and a member of the Osmeriformes order. It gets its common name from its ability to spend part of the year in a state of aestivation when its pool dries up.

So it ain’t all doom and gloom. The natural world still has plenty of surprises in store for
us. Watch this space...

GUEST BLOGGER OLL LEWIS: Whither the CFZ Archiving Project?

Oll has been jolly busy and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download HERE should you want to..

However Oll has a conundrum. What should he do next?

Vote for the next archive upload!

If you’ve been following the progress of the CFZ archive you’ll be aware that I’ve undertaken the humongous task of scanning uploading all of our stored news stories, letters, photos, slides and other documents dating from the olden days before nearly every news story was available online. If not then you really have missed out, check out the archive now for your chance to read newspaper articles on aquatic monsters from as far back as two centuries ago, read the news stories about the 1999 great white shark sightings off the Cornish coast, and see photographs from America allegedly depicting the carcass of a gigantic octopus. In the latest update you get the chance to read most of the stories published when it was revealed that the ‘surgeon’s photo’ of the Loch Ness monster was a hoax, one of the defining moments of cryptozoological history whether we like it of not.

With the set of articles on the surgeon’s photo I’ve finished scanning in the first of our box files and rather than just select another box file from the stack at random to scan next, Jon and I thought it’d be a good idea to let you guys choose what you want scanned in next. Simply post a comment after this blog with your chosen subject from the short list and the subject with the most votes gets scanned in next, so if you see a subject you like on the list and don’t vote you’ve only got yourself to blame if you have to wait a few months to see it.

The Candidates:
1) Dragons
2) Reptiles
3) Birds
4) BHM
5) Lake Monsters
6) Big Cats

Get voting.

THE BRITISH GUPPY

I would hazard a guess that the fishkeeping careers of a large proportion of the readers of this bloggo started with the humble guppy. A strikingly attractive, and ridiculously hardy little fish, specimens can be purchased for well under a quid in any petshop in the land. It is a native of north-eastern South America north of the Amazon, and some of its offshore islands (the Leeward Islands, Trinidad, and Barbados in the Windward group) from where it has been introduced to many West Indian islands to control mosquitoes. It was introduced into North America for the same purpose in 1908 and to Hong Kong in the years just after WW1. All this is well known, but what is less well known is that there are, or at least were guppies living wild in the UK.

According to Sir Christopher Lever, the world`s expert on the subject of naturalised animals, during the 1970`s there were at least two colonies of these hardy little tropical fish living wild in the United Kingdom. But how is this? you might well ask. The more eco-concerned of you might start to rant about the abominable effects of global warming, but in fact the tale has a far less portentious explanation.

Between July 1966 1966 and February 1968, zoologist B.S.Meadows carried out a study into a naturalised population of guppies that were living in a stretch of the River Lea which runs through Hackney in north-east London, where the temperature of the water had been raised to an ideal height for these tiny South American fishes. Ironically the population only surviveds because that portion of the river was so polluted that the only remaining native fish was the three spined stickleback which did not pose a threat to the burgeoning population of tropical livebearers.

When he wrote his seminal book “The Naturalised Animals of the British Isles” in 1975, Sir Christopher Lever noted sadly, that although the gradual clean-up of the river could only be a good thing environmentally speaking, it would probably mean the end of the River Lea`s population of guppies as larger, predatory species recolonised their old haunts, and munched away at the dwindling population of tropical interlopers.

History doesn`t relate whether Lever`s dismal predictions were right or not, because around about 190 the old coal powered power station was closed down for good, and whether or not there were any siurviving guppies in the river, they would certainly have died out when the water temperature returned to normal.

The other population of British guppies has an even morte interesting – and tragic – history. In 1963, a pet shop in Lancashire went out of business and the proprietor, hearlessly threw all his stock of tropical fish into the St Helen`s Canal, where they would undoubtedly have died very quickly had a 400 yard stretch of the waterway not been heated to an ideal temperature for tropical fish by the discharge from the nearby Pilkington Brothers Glass Factory.

According to Lever, a viable breeding population of guppies and also of Red Bellied Tilapia (Tilapia zillii) was soon established along with non breeding populations of angel fish, mollies and an un-named species of tropical catfish. According to Leslie Bromilow, the secretary of the St Helen`s Angling Association, this stretch of canal became known as “The Hotties” and the tropical intruders survived happily there for many years.

However, this story too has an unhappy ending. Leslie told us wryly: “unfortunately about ten years ago they switched the pumps off and the water cooled down and all the fish dies, but there is still a thriving population of Red Eared Terrapins”.

We spoke to the press office at Pilkington Brothers who confirmed Leslie`s story, and although they bemoaned the fact that they had destroyed the country`s only surviving wild population of tropical fish, they were not at all impressed by our suggestion that the least that they could do was to release thirty quids worth of guppies back into the water and start again.

So there you have it? Is the guppy (and the red bellied tilapia) finally extinct in the UK or are there other serendipitously introduced populations lurking in areas where industrial activity has inadvertantly provided an environment where they can live and thrive?

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: Legend of the Welsh Lakes

Once again we hand you over to guest blogger Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He intends to be a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this will be jolly good news for all of us..

Since I have lived in Wales since I was a nipper, Welsh folklore is very much my thang, so don’t be surprised if this blog is strongly biased towards Cryptidiau Cymru.

One of the most significant cryptids from Welsh folklore is the Afanc: it features in several legends of some antiquity. And yet it remains one of the most obscure, since, as far as I can tell, there is no description of it.

The mysterious monster is linked to several lakes in North Wales: Llyn Barfog and Llyn Ffynnon Las, both in Snowdonia, Llyn Llion (unknown but possibly an old name for Llyn Tegid, ie Bala Lake) and Llyn yr Afanc, a deep pool in the River Conwy.

In two of these stories, the monster has been causing terrible floods until defeated by a hero: at Llyn Barfog by King Arthur and at Llyn yr Afanc by Hu Gadarn (Huw the Mighty, an archetype who might be a form of the Celtic Horned God). Both heroes employ enormous long-horned oxen, the Ychen Bannog – which deserve an article to themselves (I suspect they are memories of the auroch) – to haul him from his watery den.

Although these legends wax lyrical about the oxen, descriptions of the monstrous Afanc are not forthcoming, other than that he is capable of causing floods and is of great size. Although, in fact, the latter characteristic isn’t certain either. Prof John Rhys associated the word afanc with the Irish abhac, meaning ‘dwarf, pigmy, manikin, a sprite’. In one tale the Afanc throws poisoned darts and in the River Conwy story he talks to his captor: suggesting a more human form.

Afon is the Welsh word for river and afanc may therefore be a derivation, simply meaning ‘of the river’, or ‘creature of the river’, which is no help either. Today, the Afanc tends to be imagined as a dragon, fulfilling the same folkloric (and ecological) niche as English beasts like the Lambton Worm.

But it’s significant that he word afanc survived into the Middle Ages to mean beaver: in the 12th century, Giraldus Cambrensis mentions the beaver as an exotic animal still inhabiting the River Teifi in South Wales. Folklorist T Gwynn Jones made the sensible observation that we shouldn’t forget ‘the evidence of great inundations caused by the bursting of beaver dams’ – after all the only certain characteristic we do know of the legendary Afanc is that it could cause floods.
It seems likely then that in the imaginations of the early Welsh, the Afanc was not a dragon. What their imaginations conjured up was an enormous hairy beaver.

(Ahem! I’m sorry – have I said something funny? Quick someone, slap Richard Freeman on the back, he appears to be choking.)

For more of Richard Holland’s blather, visit http://www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk/ and http://www.uncannyuk.com/

SITUATIONS VACANT: Indexer for the Archiving Project

As regular readers will know the CFZ Archiving Project is well under way, and Oll Lewis is doing a sterling job scanning and uploading the voluminous CFZ collection of Press Cuttings. However in order for the archive to be a truly useful resource, it needs to be properly catalogued, and so we are looking for someone to do it for us.

Ideally, I think, we can once again utilise Blogspot, and start up a new blog which can function as an index to the Archiving Project. However, if anyone has better ideas please do get in touch with them.

It is time, once again, for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party, so please Mr, Mrs, or Miss Volunteer ---- Come on down!!!

Another bunch of goodies from the CFZ Archiving Project

Why is Oll wearing a hat indoors? Possibly because of his obsession with Indiana Jones, but possibly just for effect. Never mind. He has been jolly busy and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download should you want to..


http://www.cfz.org.uk//Archiving/Aquatic%203/


There's over thirty news items there with lots and lots more to follow. Have fun :)

GUEST BLOGGER GLEN VAUDREY: Jellyfish japes

Glen is a very new recruit to Planet CFZ. Indeed, we had never heard from him until a few months ago when he wrote - slightly diffidently - to us, asking whether he could write a volume in our ongoing series The Mystery Animals of The British Isles. We asked him for a proposed synopsis and a sample of his writing, and were overawed by what we received. Here was a man who loved both words and the countryside, and could use one to describe the other in poetic but always down to earth terms. We were beginning to come to the conclusion that here was someone that Bob Marley would have described as a `Natural Mystic`, when the final manuscript arrived, and we knew that we were right. So we asked him to be a guest blogger..

But I’m not really thinking of swarms of little jellyfish, I’m not even considering big jellyfish, I’m thinking about those giant jellyfish that have occasionally been sighted.

There is, let’s face it, something so alien about the jellyfish that makes it hard to empathise or to make a connection with. Just consider, the fearsome mysterious big cat the Mngwa which hails from Tanzania might reach the size of a donkey but it did actually start its life as a rather cuddly kitten, and even the monster phantom black hell hounds that are rumoured still to plod along lonely country lanes at some stage would have been lovely little puppies, even if in their case they would posses cute blazing red eyes.

But jellyfish don’t go through that cute and cuddly phase, no big eyes staring up at you lovingly just a tentacle-waving lump. While they might start off small miniatures of their adult selves some have a fair bit of growing to do especially if they are destined to be a dirty great big man-eating leviathan.

In 1865 a lion’s mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) was recorded in Massachusetts bay as having a bell of seven feet in diameter with a fine set of tentacles measuring up to 120 feet in length, now I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to be in the sea when that one went by, and thinking about it it might take a while for it to actually go by.

But there are tales of even bigger jellyfish out there, a sighting made by two skin divers off the coast of Bermuda, Pat Boatwright and Richard Winer claimed to have observed a giant jellyfish swimming beneath them. They would later give a description of a very large jellyfish having a pink and purple bell that they estimated to be between 50 and 100 foot in diameter.

On other occasions the jellyfish isn’t below you, sometimes it lands on you! Such was the case in 1973 when a jellyfish landed on the deck of the 1,483 ton ship the Kuranda during a storm as it was sailing between Australia and Fiji. The Kuranda’s Captain, Langley Smith, described how after crashing through a large wave the receding water left behind an unwelcome present, a giant jellyfish.

He estimated it to have a weight of around 20 tons and it had ended up spread across the deck to a depth of two feet, if that wasn’t bad enough it also possessed a fine set of tentacles that the good captain believed would have stretch in excess of 200 feet. It would in the end take a water jet from a salvage tug to shift this great lump off the Kuranda.

If all these sighting weren’t bad enough what are we to make of the tale told of a French fisherman going by the name of Henri Baiselle who claimed that a giant jellyfish the size of a car ate not only his wife but his two children in the Bay of Biscay.

THE ARCHIVING PROJECT:The second trenche of aquatic cryptoclippings is online

The other day we told you about how Oll Lewis is hard at work on the long awaited CFZ Archiving Project. He is still hard at it, and the second trenche of downloads is now available. They include stories on Lake Van in Turkey, various sightings at Loch Ness, as well as odd aquatic stories from the west of Ireland, and from Tasmania.

Download them for free: HERE

THE CFZ ARCHIVING PROJECT IS GO

Nearly fifteen years ago, in one of the first issues of our journal Animals & Men I made a manifesto promise. I promised to make our archive of press cuttings and articles available online, for free, to anyone who wanted them. Well, it has taken fifteen years, but today - in a small way at least - we started.



Exhibit One:


This is a picture of a certain Welsh ecologist slaving over a red hot scanner, as he slowly works his way through the CFZ archives. The picture was taken earlier this afternoon, and we are happy to say that the first fifteen scanned clippings from our voluminous archives of lake, sea, and river monsters, and other aquatic anomalies, are now available HERE

The more mealy mouthed amongst you will note that these cuttings are presented in a somewhat willy-nilly fashion. You would be right, but unkind to point it out. At the moment Oll is just scanning them, naming the subsequent files, and then uploading them to basic folders. What we would really like, in a few months from now when there is a significant amount of data with which to deal, for a couple of volunteers who have basic htm coding skills to offer to arrange them into some coherent order on a dedicated blog page.

We are hoping to get some trainees from the government's New Deal scheme, and have a hell of a lot of scanning completed within the next three months. So if you want to be involved in an interesting and useful project, now is your time to volunteer.

We will, of course be keeping you all up to date with the progress of the project.