How New Zealander’s Nessie-hunting tricked the world into learning more about science The world into learning more about science

Here’s an anecdote that, for Professor Neil Gemmell, puts his weird year as a monster-hunting scientist smartly into perspective.

On a pier in Santa Monica just west of Los Angeles, a researcher is about to board a boat.

A couple of curious passers-by ask about all the containers that she has with her.

She explains she’s going out to collect water samples, so she can use something called environmental DNA to reveal what species of turtles and other marine life are present in that part of the ocean.

“Then they say, oh, like the Loch Ness Monster?” Gemmell says.

“Here we have a couple of people over in America who get told about environmental DNA by this scientist, and they immediately link that back to my project. It’s surreal.”

Indeed, the Otago University anatomy professor probably just pulled off the biggest feat of science communication ever seen in New Zealand, all because of a rather large, undoubtedly mythical, aquatic creature from the Scottish Highlands.

Gemmell is a hugely respected scientist in his field. But that’s not to say his work hasn’t made for fascinating, often quirky, media articles in the past.

There was a study he co-authored on the king salmon’s bizarre ability to adjust its sperm’s swimming speed, and another focused on a ghoulish parasite that reproduced by brainwashing its victim and forcing it to kill itself. More recently, there was the bluehead wrasse, which gave Gemmell and colleagues a longsought explanation for why some fish species can change their sex.

And each were comprehensively eclipsed by the publicity behemoth that was essentially a side-project for Gemmell — a DNA sweep of a lake for one Loch Ness Monster.

“We’d like to think that we do some pretty cool work at Otago, like how we might use gene drives for the control of predators,” he said.

“You mention the Loch Ness Monster . . . and suddenly you’ve got an audience of millions.”

When his university’s press office sent out a media advisory this month — merely stating that Gemmell and colleagues would soon be revealing the results of their survey — that was enough to spark a fresh flurry of stories that reached an estimated 384 million people around the globe.

“I don’t want to say everything else that we do is trivial, but this was the single biggest story the University of Otago has ever had. It’s the biggest story, I think, New Zealand science has had for a long time. Perhaps ever.

“I find that quite ironic because we’ve had scientists who discovered genes associated with stomach cancer. We’ve had people who made major discoveries to do with the origins of the universe and how black holes are formed. None of it has had the same penetration at a public level that this thing has.”

A couple of years ago, Darren Naish, the author of a book called Hunting Monsters, used the platform to quiz Gemmell on whether environmental DNA, or eDNA, might be the

key to clearing up the Nessie mystery.

Environmental DNA, capable of uncovering a wealth of information with just a single water sample, seemed an obvious solution.

Gemmell got an email from John Paul Breslin, a Scottish journalist , asking whether they’d ended up progressing the idea. Though the answer was no, it was still enough to give Breslin an article that quickly spread across the Scottish press — then around the planet.

The response stunned Gemmell. “In fact, we would have got more publicity out of just saying we’d decided not to do anything at Loch Ness than all of the other work my team had done put together — it was crazy.”

Choosing to pursue the project obviously posed a potential risk to his scientific reputation, with some colleagues suggesting the idea could be a career-killer.

Yet he also understood that doing science was just one part of a scientist’s work; sharing and communicating it was another. “I felt like for 25 years of my academic career, I’d only just realised how I could be smart about it,” he said.

A couple of months after that, Gemmell found himself on a boat in Loch Ness, collecting hundreds of samples from various parts of the lake, some from as deep as 200m.

“I have a preconception about what the answer is, but I’m happy to be wrong. Because there have been situations in the past 100 years where species thought to have been extinct have been found.

We would have got more publicity out of just saying we’d decided not to do anything at Loch Ness than all of the other work my team had done put together — it was crazy.

“And there have been situations where we’ve found a biological basis for creatures once described in the annals of mariners, like krakens from the deep, or giant squids.”

Of all those thousands and thousands of media stories, Gemmell estimates about 98 per cent were positive, and almost all inadvertently gave readers a quick tutorial in eDNA.

“I like to say that the monster was the bait — and the science was the hook,” he said.

There were some negative stories but science writer Ellen Rykers penned a rebuttal in defence of Gemmell, pointing out the objective was never to find Nessie, but to use her to “communicate some serious science in a captivating way”.

Gemmell circles back to that point himself. “I used to laugh at people like The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin — you know, nature is wonderful as long as you can hold it, but through his actions, and the through the way he communicated his science, he probably changed the lives of a generation.

“I mean, I always thought he was a bit dumb, but maybe I was the one who was dumb.

“Some people still look at me and say, Neil, this is just crazy. And there are plenty of people who are out to giggle about it and I’ll laugh along. But actually, I’m achieving what I wanted to do, which is to get people talking about this technology.”

Just like those people, on that pier in Santa Monica, on the other side of the planet.