Modern biology is battling the mysteries of the deep sea -- including the Giant Florida Octopus, the Fortune Bay Sea Monster and the inimitable Tasmanian Blobster.

These fearsome-sounding creatures aren't alien monsters. They're just shapeless lumps of tissue, the remains of earthly beasts that have washed ashore, biologists say.

Canadian scientists used DNA to identify a blubbery mass that washed up in Newfoundland's Fortune Bay in August. The Fortune Bay Sea Monster turns out to be the rotten remnants of a sperm whale, the team reports in the February issue of Biological Bulletin.

The discovery shows that DNA analysis can pin identities on unknown sea monsters, says team leader Steven Carr.

In some ways, the work brings exotic monsters down to earth, revealing them as rotten masses of ordinary animals. But scientists may yet stumble across something unknown, says Carr, of Memorial University of Newfoundland.

SURPRISES, SOMETIMES
''There is always the possibility of something entirely different, something we don't know anything about,'' he says. In the last century, he notes, scientists discovered many deep-sea oddities, including the megamouth shark and the coelacanth fish.

''You never know what you're going to find down there,'' he says.

Carr's lab was called into action after Fortune Bay residents discovered a smelly, 18-foot-long mass on their beach.

The ''monster'' appeared to be covered in hair and carved with gill-like slits. Even local fishermen were puzzled enough to call in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Department experts took some tissue samples and sent them to Carr's lab, believing they might be the remains of a basking shark.

At the university, scientists extracted DNA from four chunks of tissue, looking to identify the unique chemical sequence that each species carries as its DNA. Because the lab's machine wasn't working, the researchers had to mail the samples off to a commercial laboratory.

Carr then compared the sea-monster DNA to a worldwide database of known animal genes. The closest match, with greater than 99 percent certainty: sperm whale.

''The fortuitous part is that we got a match,'' says Carr. ``The coverage for whales is pretty good because people have been working on this particular gene.''

AN ALIEN LOOK
Sperm whales live off southern Newfoundland, and, occasionally, identifiable carcasses wash ashore there. The Fortune Bay Sea Monster looked otherworldly because it had decomposed for so long, says Carr. The ''gills'' turned out to be flesh from between the whale's ribs. The ''hairs'' were actually abraded tissue mixed with sand and seaweed.

The same technique could work for other sea monsters, as long as the body contains some DNA, Carr says.

His lab is now working on the Tasmanian Blobster, a chunk that washed up in western Tasmania in January 1998. But the material might be too degraded to yield good DNA, Carr says.

The Tasmanian chunk came from another biologist with a side interest in sea monsters -- Sidney Pierce of the University of South Florida.

In 1995, Pierce published a report disenfranchising the Giant Florida Octopus, a blob that washed onto St. Augustine beaches in 1896. Earlier scientists had guessed that it might represent an unknown giant species of octopus.

Through microscopic studies of the tissue fibers, plus biochemical analysis of their makeup, Pierce determined that the tissue wasn't an octopus at all, but rather a chunk of whale skin.

''After we published that, people began sending me these dreadfully smelling pieces of stuff from all over the world, including a chunk from this Tasmanian thing,'' Pierce said.

His microscopic studies suggest that the Tasmanian Blobster is also whale. The mystery awaits Carr's analysis.

Even Scotland's Nessie might yield her secrets to DNA testing, Carr jokes.

''One of our idle beer conversations was about trying to come up with a molecular test for the Loch Ness monster,'' he says.

Theoretically, a large enough volume of loch water would contain DNA shed by the animals living in it. A search for DNA matches with known species might yield a puzzling unknown -- maybe something like a crocodile's DNA, he says.

Still, he doesn't think his tests could finally discover the Loch Ness monster.

``You probably couldn't make something specific enough that you wouldn't spend a lot of time identifying all the birds swimming around in Loch Ness.''

• Story originally published by:
Dallas Morning News via The Miami Herald / FL | Alexandra Witz - Mar 20.02

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