[QUOTE=Xiao3 Meng4;1096896]
It’s doubtful that Nessie is/was an Eel; the largest Eel on record to date is only 5ft long and 15" around.[/quote]
There are eel like fish however that average larger. The electric eel (which isn’t really an eel) averages about 6ft.
The problem with a Nessie isn’t just lack of food. Its overall design. To accept a Nessie creature in the manner that believers propose requires you to disregard everything we see in nature. You are speaking of a creature which would presumably be at or near the top of the particular food chain since we’ve found nothing in the way of stomach contents of other creatures to suggest it would be prey. The problem is that it presents none of the morphology common to aquatic predators; stream lined body to reduce drag, fin set ill designed for rapid swimming, irregularly long neck structure that would cause issues with digestion, blood flow, temp regulation to head, etc. You could always say, “well we haven’t found out everything and we are always finding new and weird creatures that don’t follow the rules.” But really, no we don’t. In the aquatic world there are a number of creatures unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. And they always follow the same general structure for, in this case assuming, a pelagic nektonic predator. You see torpedo like body, typically a backbone structure extending into a tail for more powerful stroke, etc.
There is a non fish organism it does somewhat resemble, the archaeoceti, in particular ambulocetus,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulocetus
Which is a line of early cetaceans. These mammals are what are believed to have transitioned from land back to water and evolved into modern whales, dolphins and porpoises. However, the neck is too short and well, we see that modern cetaceans follow the above characteristics of streamlined body and fish like fin structure (minus the fluke). And nevermind that cetaceans are marine not freshwater (except freshwater dolphin).
So you could say they are just a rare holdover from a past time whose numbers are now in decline. But if its this rare then how does it reproduce (especially in isolation such as Lake Champlain)? We are already seeing a number of issues in whales species along the lines of genetic defects and disease due to reduced genetic diversity from overhunting. How would such an organism survive this long in such reduced numbers?
Lastly, you could say that its just so deep dwelling we just haven’t seen it. Well to that, most truly deep living organisms have very different structure than those of shallower depths. They are cartilagenous and have flabby muscle tone to survive the pressures. They are blind which would limit hunting in shallow depths. Most don’t surface, the most notable to my mind being sturgeon, which is also cartilagenous but again has the typical tubelike shape even though in this case a bottom feeder. And assuming all this doesn’t matter, it is a deep dwelling organism, how does it deal with pressure changes when surfacing? Lungs, swim bladders, etc would all be out of the question for an organism that is deep dwelling and simply surfacing (as opposed to say whales which are surface dwelling (relatively) and simply dive for feeding and such).
I just don’t see how a creature like this could exist. It’d be cool if it did, but everything says otherwise.
