- THE TALE OF HUCHO TAIMEN

"Does the Kanas Lake Monster, long veiled in secrecy, really ex­ist? These questions will hopefully be answered this Septem­ber". So noted ‘China Daily' this summer, reporting the launch of an RMB1.5m scientific expedition to investigate the mythical beast that is alleged to live in this beautiful lake in the Altai Mountain area of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. This follows a "sighting" of the creature by several tourists in June. Our China Briefing colleague Graham Thompson - who incidentally was once the Scottish govern­ment official who would have been responsible for the famous Loch Ness monster, had it ever been found - investigates.

The local media re­ported that "on the af­ternoon of 7 June 2005, seven Beijing tourists on a sightseeing boat on Kanas Lake were taking photos when they noticed that about 200m from their boat, the calm lake surface was shattered by a metre high wave and two large unidentified black ob­jects appeared above water, one following the other and swimming rapidly from west to east toward the center of the lake, leaving a trail of turbulent water like that left by a speedboat, before disappearing after two minutes and the lake surface then restored its calm". The "monster" was said to be around 10m long. They took pictures, although these are somewhat inconclusive. Reports of this kind have been circulating for some years, along with tales of missing cows, horses and sheep.

It's maybe not just Kanas. A "giant va­pour-breathing crea­ture" called Chan is said to live at the bot­tom of a deep gorge in a remote mountain area in Hubei province. The first recorded sight­ing came in 1962 from peasants who were fishing in the gorge by throwing explosives into the water. Chan allegedly emerged and chased the frightened fishermen - not unreasonably, if they were dynamiting it. In 2003, a group of soldiers claimed to see an animal with "a round, black head with 10cm horns and scales on its back" in Tianchi Lake in Jilin Province. Neither story is verified.

Nor is China the only country with alleged "lake monsters". As well as the most famous of them all, "Nessie" in Scot­land's Loch Ness, there are stories of creatures of various kinds in at least 10 other nations, including :

In the US

the Great Lakes, including Lake Erie's "South Bay Bessie"

"Champ", in New York's Lake Champlain

"Chessie" in Cheasepeake Bay

"Slimy Slim", Lake Payette, Idaho

Lake Iliamna in Alaska

Opopogo in Canada's Lake Okanagan

Lake Van, eastern Turkey

Lake Storsjon in Sweden

"Selma", lake Seljord, Norway

"Brosnie", in Lake Brosno, Russia

Lake Kos Kol, Kazakhstan

the Mzintlawa River in South River, where a "half-fish, half-horse" is said to dwell

"Issie" in Lake Ikeda, Japan

Nahuelito in Nahuel Huapi lake, a resort in Patagonia, Argentina

"Nessie" first "appeared" in the early 1930s (although are some claims she was around in AD565) and several of these other ones are clearly named in a similar style. However, some alleged sightings of these creatures date back to the 19th century or earlier.

Monster tourism

The local economy around Loch Ness does extremely well from its most famous resident, and the local tourist board says the tales bring in over US$200m a year from 200,000 visi­tors. According to a poll on the website of The Scotsman, one of the main Scottish newspapers, 87% of 1,225 respondents believe in the creature. Websites like www.loch-ness-scot­land.com and www.lochness.co.uk/exhibition help to keep things ticking over, as does the occasional hoax sighting. In the first holiday I remember taking with my parents, in the late 1960s, we stayed in a small cottage in the village of Drumnad­rochit on the shores of the loch - we saw nothing, although we looked pretty hard. Since then, the tourist infrastructure has grown to include major exhibitions and boat trips, and there have also been umpteen scientific projects aimed at solving the mystery.

The importance of the beast to local tourist revenues has cre­ated a tendency for the Scottish media to print "Nessie" sto­ries in early summer. For example, The Scotsman ran related stories on 26 May, 3 June, 25 June, 5 July and 6 July 2005.

Hucho taimen

But what might actually be the real source all this excitement at Kanas ? Matters may be somewhat more mundane that local tourism officials actually desire (in Scotland, the worst thing that could happen to Loch Ness would be for someone to prove "Nessie" is simply a boring, albeit large, fish). Yuan Guoying, director of Xinjiang Ecology Institute told the me­dia this summer that "after 20 years of study he believes the so-called Lake Monster is a type of large fish called a Hucho taimen", and that "the lake's cold water could have made it grow very large".

Hucho Taimen does indeed live in Kanas. It is the biggest of the salmonid fish family. The maximum published weight is 70kg, although there are reports in "old tales" of 100kg mon­sters caught in Siberia. The current world game fish record is around 41kg. The fish have been known to grow as long as 1.6m and to live for 16 years. They are top predators, feeding on smaller fishes and also amphibians, small mammals and birds - a diet that could easily give rise to "monster" stories.. The Hucho taimen is also very old, dating back some 18m years, compared to other salmon that are only 2-3 m years old.

Its preferred habitats are rivers and lakes, and it is an exclu­sively fluvial species that prefers swift-flowing rivers and, unlike smaller salmonids, never descends to the sea. Kanas Lake is at an altitude of 1,400m above sea level, and originates from the Tapenggeduo Glacier. The lake is 25km long and 1.6-2.9km wide, surrounded with cliffy mountains, and with a depth of 188.5m, is the second deepest inland lake in China (Loch Ness is 36km long, up to 2.4km wide, 250m deep, and also surrounded by mountains).

The fish is distributed from the Volga and Pechora River basins east to the Yana River in the north, and that of the Amur River in the south. On a larger scale, this includes parts of the Cas­pian and Arctic drainages in Eurasia and portions of the Pacific drainage in Mongolia and Russia (the Amur River). In Mongo­lia the taimen is found in both the Arctic and Pacific drainages, specifically the Yenisei, the Selenga/Lena, and the Amur River Basins. The fish is listed as endangered by the Russian and Mongolian authorities, with the main threats being over-fish­ing (it is a popular game fish), pollution and habitat destruc­tion. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation noted in a 1999 study that the species is "in danger of extinction".

Work is underway to conserve the hucho tiamen, with teams from several US university teams working in Mongolia with a local NGO, the Taimen Conservation Fund (for more info, see http://limnology.wisc.edu/mongolia/index.htm and www.taimen.org). The WWF and the National Geographic Society are also involved in a related project that aims to protect all the world's large freshwater fish [query with Carine]. We hope that this Xinjiangese "gentle giant" will survive to be enjoyed by generations of tourists and enthusiasts in the future.

Handy timing, huh ? This summer there has also been some useful publicity surrounding a new thriller, The Loch.

So it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the Kanas Lake monster has been getting a bit of media coverage in early sum­mer either. The alleged sighting occurred on 7 June and was reported on 9 June with a further story on 13 June, followed by the report of the new expedition on 7 July. As China Daily, noted, "talk of Kanas' "lake monster" has stirred strong interest within domestic, even overseas, tourists in this mat­ter", adding, "up to the middle of June, the number of visi­tors approached 20,000, rising 30% over the same period last year. Among these visitors, most of them were from outside of Xinjiang, even from overseas. Tourists from outside of Xinji­ang grew 55% year on year while overseas tourists increased 18%".

All of which brings in some handy revenues for a part of the country where average rural incomes are only a bit over RMB2000 a year. In 2002, the government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region launched a major campaign to boost the area's attractiveness - "we are speeding up our ef­forts to build up the tourism industry into one of the region's pillar industries in the coming 10 years," said Zhang Zhou, vice-chairman of the ethnic region, adding that tourism in Xin­jiang is expected to record a historical high of 10% of GDP by 2010. The Kanas Lake monster is clearly able to help out. A "puff piece" in the People's Daily in 2003 noted, "no guided tour of Lake Kanas is complete without the mention of the legendary lake monster, whose head is as large as, if not larger than, a boat".