If you’re in the habit of reading my weekly columns, you may recall one I wrote a while back about the legend of the Loch Ness Monster and our own local legend from Mooringsport about Cypress Cindy who was first spotted back in 1969 in Caddo Lake. To my knowledge, there haven’t been any recent sightings of Cindy outside of her replica’s occasional appearance for Mooringsport’s Fall Festival.
But I’m not focusing on lake monsters this week, instead I’m treading into larger bodies of water to talk about National Sea Serpent Day which falls on August 7th every year. Sea serpents, sometimes called sea dragons, have been a part of our stories since ancient times and while the descriptions vary, they do seem to have made an appearance in many cultures’ myths and tend to have the basic characteristics of a gigantic snake.
One such account of an encounter with a sea serpent came from the sailors aboard the HMS Daedalus in 1848 as they voyaged across the South Atlantic to Saint Helena, an island off the west coast of mainland Africa, in which they describe a 60-foot-long creature with a maned head. Today, there are multiple theories on what these mythical creatures might have actually been.
For instance, cryptozoologists speculate that sea serpents are relict Mosozoic marine reptiles, such as the plesiosaur or the mosasaur. Others speculate that oarfish, which have been known to grow to 50 feet in length might have been identified as sea serpents, in part due to the rare occurrence of their sightings because they mostly dwell thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. Another theory comes from Gary J. Galbreath, a professor of biological sciences, who believes the sei whale may have been mistaken for a giant serpent.
But sea serpents aren’t entirely mythical or now identified as a different animal entirely; the sea snake is real and looks much like any other snake you could call to mind. The main difference between the legendary sea serpent and the sea snakes we might encounter today is their size which, according to my brief research, doesn’t tend to get above about 9 feet in length. There are more than 60 species of sea snakes that have been identified though, so if curiosity strikes you, you could do a bit of your own research and see if any of them grows longer.
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New & Coming Soon:
The Best Lies: A Novel by David Ellis (Fiction; Book, eBook, eAudiobook)
The Forgotten Names: A Novel by Mario Escobar (Fiction; Book, eBook, eAudiobook)
The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld by Dan Slater (Non-Fiction; Book)
The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America by Larry Tye (Non-Fiction; Book)
Pearce Oysters: A Novel by Joselyn Takacs (Fiction; Book)
The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma by Soraya Chemaly (Non-Fiction; Book)
Tiger, Tiger: His Life, As It’s Never Been Told Before by James Patterson (Biography; Book, eBook)