Where Be Monsters? The Daedalus Sea Serpent and the War for Credibility

> Whatever the reality, the number of reported sea serpent sightings declined rapidly after the nineteenth century. Writing in 1925, Austin Clark of the Smithsonian Institution offered a typical explanation for the decline. “In the last 20 years,” Clark noted, the size of ships rapidly increased and steam ships replaced sailing vessels. These maritime advances mean that the “vantage point” for observing the sea serpent moved “from the low and insecure wave-washed deck of a small sailing boat to the high, comfortable, secure, and relatively dry deck of a much larger steamer.” This shift in perspective “removed the element of fear and hence dulled the imagination so that sailors are now able to study calmly and report correctly what they see.”

Or perhaps the sea serpents were predators, and they depended on one of the species that our bigger and more powerful ships allowed us to hunt more efficiently, and we destroyed enough of their food source that they went extinct.

Much of these stories remind me of the stories of giant waves that come out of nowhere and destroy ships. Sailors told stories of these waves for centuries, and their stories were dismissed as exaggerations from drinking or their judgement being thrown off by rough seas (e.g., you think the wave was 75 feet because it was taller than your 75 foot mast...but because of the rough seas you didn't realize the mast was actually pointing at a steep angle at the time so the top was only 40 feet above the water).

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists thoroughly understood ocean waves, and stated that it was impossible to have waves higher than 50ft in open ocean. No matter how many sailors saw such waves, they were told that they MUST be wrong because science had proved such waves cannot exist.

Then sensors on an unmanned platform in the North Sea reported an 84 ft wave during a storm. The operators assumed that this meant that the sensors were malfunctioning, and sent a repair crew. The crew found that the sensors were fine, and there were clear signs of wave damage showing that the wave really was that big.

Now that scientists finally had evidence that they could not dismiss as drunken sailors, they went looking for more evidence and quickly found many instances of rogue waves. They found enough to see a pattern, and were able to figure out some of the conditions that would cause them, and find areas that would have a lot of them. And guess what, those were the areas where sailors had long been reporting ships wiped out by those "impossible" waves.

Science is great. It's the best thing we've got for finding out the truth about nature. But sometimes science gets arrogant and ignores anecdotal evidence even when it is so widespread that some of it almost certainly is from reliable observers. That's what happened with rogue waves, and I would not be at all surprised if that happened with at least some of the "mythical" large sea creatures.

You've got to remember that the first anatomical specimen of a platypus sent from Australia to London was considered to be a hoax. That was the scientific establishment rejecting an actual specimen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus

It's hardly surprising that mere sightings of a creature were treated with the same incredulity, particularly if it had originated as the stuff of sailors legends. Most people would associate it with Yeti sightings or similar.

But as a lost airliner proves, people are too willing to think that searchability and knowledge about continents extends equally to the deep ocean. When the truth is that we probably know a lot more about what's in the solar system than what is in the deep oceans.

Not my post but I'll add a little meta observation anyway: I can't see why this isn't taking off at HN.

I've personally found the recent discovery of the giant octopus interesting. It has been reported by sailors for numerous times as far as I know, yet science has shown little intereset until a specimen was found.

In the same vein the fact that wolves have attacked humans in the last 5 years is very interesting. When I grew up we were taught that wolves were afraid of humans and none of the old stories were true. (I have come to the conclusion top trust naval officers and grandparents more than scientists in such cases.)

There are a lot of interesting subjects this article covers. One that stood out to me was how new evidence seeming in favor of something can be turned against it. E.T. Jaynes describes it with what he calls the "deception hypothesis". A nice article touching on that can be found here:

http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/12/e-t-jaynes-explai...

Experts in a field can also be quick to dismiss new ideas and accounts presented by people not in their field, or without years of experience and a strong reputation. To me it seems similar to how programmers can be quick to dismiss unlikely-sounding user bug reports, until they can see the bug with their own eyes.

preface: this was a great and interesting article, forgive my grumbles below :)

People are rarely reliable witnesses when they are trying to tell a story. Being an officer of anything doesn't really lend anyone extra credibility either, everyone has their own biases and fantasies. Astronauts have claimed to see aliens and this doesn't make them more credible than a guy on his farm who claims the same thing.

I do think that it's always worth keeping an open mind about the existence of undiscovered creatures, but I don't think it's necessary to latch on to transient sightings to decide that those are the creatures we should look for.

Every time a decaying dead whale washes up on shore, even smart people think it might be something new or undiscovered, because that sounds less banal than the reality, this causes news media to stir up because life is generally boring, and people eat it up for the same reason.

I'll leave the science to the scientists and wait patiently for their new discoveries :)