It’s the “Loch Ness Monster of New Orleans.”
A daycare center owner in The Big Easy posted a video of a massive fish swimming in the lagoon in City Park. Fishermen and locals from the area were puzzled by what exactly the creature was as well, since the area is home to a number of large fish species. Local ABC affiliate WGNO said that local officials are investigating the strange aquatic creature.
Kim Frusciante, the co-founder of Early Partners preschool in New Orleans, said she saw the fish while walking through the park with her family last week. “We looked into the water and saw a mysterious serpent-like creature. It is nothing I have seen before land or sea,” Frusciante told the outlet. “The great people of the internet seem to think it is a genetically modified carp fish created in a lab and released in City Park.”
“My children were a combination of terrified and excited as many children would be seeing a beast in City Park,” she continued. “It was quite long. I have a 4-year-old slightly smaller than it and it was weaving on the surface, and a lot of scales, the tail was red and it was swishing around aimlessly hanging out on the surface much longer than a normal fish.”
“In our sea creature studies, we haven’t seen anything like this in our books,” she added. “I am pretty well convinced that it is the Loch Ness monster of New Orleans,”
Frusciante posted the video of the creature to Early Partners’ Instagram account. The dorsal fin and tail of the fish can be seen thrashing in the water.
Commenters under the Instagram post, and a separate Facebook post by WGNO, gave theories about just what the monster might be.
“I used to see huge carp swimming under the bridges on Bayou St. John,” one commenter wrote. “Fascinated me as a kid, huge.”
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“Is an Alligator Gar, I see them my self, they casually come up to see what’s around, they been there for decades,” said another.
“If it has a red tail and coming to the surface it is an aripama that someone released there,” another wrote.
One user claimed that the fish had been in the lagoon for a while. “Saw this in the sculpture garden last week,” he said. “Looked like it was dying. Tail all chewed up, and the body disturbingly crooked. Figured it was a carp of some sort, but very grotesque. How is it not dead yet?”
Officials at New Orleans City Park told WGNO that they could not positively identify the creature, but they believed it was a carp. They would be working with partners to find and identify it.
The Loch Ness Monster may not be in New Orleans, but last year, evidence emerged that it could very well have existed. A group of scientists from the University of Bath and the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., and the Université Hassan II in Morocco, discovered bones belonging to a plesiosaur in the Kem Kem beds, an ancient riverbed system in what is now the Sahara desert in Morocco. The discovery indicates that plesiosaurs, originally thought to have lived only in saltwater environments, may have also lived in freshwater habitats as well.
The new discovery means that the Loch Ness Monster could have been real, in a sense. “On one level, it’s plausible,” the University of Bath said in its press release. “Plesiosaurs weren’t confined to the seas, they did inhabit freshwater.” But the release admits that stories about the monster, a.k.a. “Nessie,” are still just stories.