Dear Friends,

Welcome to another issue of the CFZ Members newsletter.  Although it might not seem like it sometimes, we are advancing with all sorts of things at a rate of knots and there are quite a lot of things on which I would like to report.

The first is an administrative one.  I have appointed Louis Rozier as General Manager of the CFZ. You will probably all be more familiar with him as the producer of our TV show On the Track, something which he has been doing now for about two and a half years.

I have never been very good at administration, and although the lovely Guin Palmer has taken over the role of Administratrix and is slowly taking over the stuff that my dear wife used to do, but it is a long and complicated learning process. I have been increasingly relying upon Louis’ advice for the past few years, even back to when he was one of the few people who knew that Corinna was dying and the fact that he is young, frighteningly intelligent and has a Masters degree in some sort of business gubbins, means that he is eminently suitable for the job.  And in any case he has been doing it, unheralded, for the past few years and I am only making it official now because I had completely forgotten to do it before.

Oh what a silly old fellow I am.  

The next piece of news is that the latest issue of Animals & Men is now available for sale on Amazon and all the other related outlets.  

https://cfz.org.uk/2023/02/am-71/   

It features:  

• Editorial
• Community Notices
• In Memoriam
• Newsfile:  New & Rediscovered
• Newsfile - BHM
• Newsfile:  Big cat
• Newsfile: Aquatic Mysteries
• Krakens in Spain:  From Myth to Reality by Javier Resines
• Escaped & Reported Crocodiles in Continental Europe by Ulrich Magin
• The Yeti of the Himalayas by Saarthak Halder
• Book Reviews

It is the first issue of our journal to come out in hard copy in about six years and we are all very pleased with it.  I have every intention of going back to our three monthly publishing schedule with #72 coming out at the beginning of June.

It is the first issue of our journal to come out in hard copy in about six years and we are all very pleased with it.  I have every intention of going back to our three monthly publishing schedule with #72 coming out at the beginning of June.

I would like to thank Richard Muirhead, who is working very hard on the next issue of Animals & Men; #73, which should be out in early June.  We are still intending to make the magazine quarterly for the first time in 20 years, and to make the yearbook annual once again.  I am sure that there is some joke about making the CFZ great again, but at the moment I can’t think of it.

Thank you to everybody who has supported us over the last month - and once again to all the people who have been kind enough to offer to become CFZ volunteers. We are always looking for more people to help, so if you are interested in joining our happy band of brothers and sisters, please email me on  becaouse we have a lot of work that needs to be done, both in research and administration… and I very very much look forward to hearing from you. 

Yours, as ever

Jon Downes

Regular readers will remember that in the last issue we were talking about extra large eels in a pool in Jersey in the Channel Islands not in North America. And regular viewers of On the Track will, I hope, remember that our Canadian representative, David Scott, spoke about a giant eel that has been reported and even filmed in the Rideau Canal in Canada.  An article in October 2018 claims that the creature is between 33 feet and 45 feet in length.  We are not convinced by this claim, but considering that there is a large amount of anecdotal evidence to support the idea that there is (or maybe are) outsized eel/s in that body of water, we are going to be looking into the subject in more depth.

This picture allegedly shows the colossal fish nicknamed ‘Elvis’, but a quick scoot about on google image search suggests that it is a long-finned eel from New Zealand which is known to grow to a much larger size than the Northern Hemisphere eels.

There is little doubt that Northern Hemisphere eels can, on occasion, grow larger than is usually thought.  We are talking about specimens of three very closely related species:  Anguilla anguilla, the Eurasian eel; Anguilla japonica, the Japanese eel;  Anguilla rostrata, the American eel.  Estimates vary, but the consensus is that none of these species grow above four feet or 122 cms in length.  Many estimates are considerably smaller.  Over the years, however, we have obtained many eye witness accounts of bigger specimens and indeed, we discovered that three very old specimens that had been in the Blackpool Tower aquarium for well over 30 years were nearly five feet in length.

Why is this more of intellectual interest?

Basically the Eunuch eel is one of the ones which is most cogent when it comes to a likely identity for “Monsters” reported in Loch Ness and other European lakes .  The theory is that when most eels reach sexual maturity they swim down river to the sea and once in the Atlantic Ocean ( European and Eastern North American eels) and the Pacific Ocean (Asian and Western Northern American eels) they swim to the Sargasso Sea (Atlantic) and to the very deep water off the Philippines (Pacific) where they mate, spawn and die.  It has been suggested that when an eel either doesn’t receive the biological imperative to go and reproduce, or is prevented from doing so (such as the eels in Jersey which we talked about last month and those which I photographed in the Blackpool Aquarium) they get larger and larger.#

So if Elvis does turn out to be a super-sized eel, once we have established its existence and vital statistics, the next step is to find out why it has grown so large.

Watch this space.

Jobs with the CFZ (sorry, nobody gets paid, not at the moment anyway!)

I don’t like to sound like a silly old man but, as I get older I am not able to do as much as I used to do.  Also, Corinna worked very hard keeping the CFZ afloat and since her death frankly, we have been struggling. Consequently,  we are looking for volunteers to do a whole range of things such as:

• News aggregation.  Updating and maintaining the news blogs on this site. Richard Freeman and I do some of this but there aren’t enough hours in the day. We need people to find news stories and enter them on the site.
• Keeping the bookshop updated. 
• Joining the Social Media team. I do not understand social media one little bit. Brad Onstott is Social Media Boy but he needs help
• Cataloguing the contents of all the OTT episodes.
• Downloading and backing up all the OTT episodes. YouTube is so volatile at the moment that it seems possible it could throw a wobbly and throw us off. We have backups of all of the episodes since we relaunched back in 2017 but owing to a mixture of computer SNAFUs and my stupidity, we do not have back ups of the 80 or so episodes before then. We also need all our other films and documentaries backed-up. Everything will have to be uploaded to our Google Drive
• Proof reading. Preferably if you have MS Publisher
• Securing image and video permissions for use in OTT and on the website 
• Helping the Trollfinder General (Ve) kick malefactors out of our various Facebook pages and groups 

Please email Jon on cfzjon@gmail.com  if you are interested

This is a remarkable book told from a unique perspective. Damon Corrie is a hereditary chief of the Eagle Clan of the Arawak Tribe based mostly in Guyana. He has made a lifelong study of the mystery animals and animal folklore of his people, and we believe that this is the first time that these remarkable accounts have been collected together in a single volume. Moreover, the CFZ's very own Richard Freeman has added a number of appendices describing the expedition that he and Damon went on in 2007.

We heartily recommend this new volume to anybody interested in the mysteries of South America and the mythology which shapes the people who still live there.

Buy it now at a special low price before it ends up on Amazon
https://cfz.org.uk/2022/05/special-offer-eagle-clan-arawak-monsters/

Rare 6ft shark washed up then decapitated on Hampshire beach

Regarding the presence of large, non-native, exotic felid species cryptically inhabiting the wilder areas of the British Isles, the objectives of the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s 'Big Cat Study Group' are: 

1. To provide irrefutable evidence, establishing the continuing existence of feral/wild big cats roaming the British Isles. 
2. Once irrefutable evidence exists, to then help assure these animals’ long-term survival by establishing protective legislation and suitable conservation programmes. 
3. To encourage professional standards of reporting and analysis of data and to strive for improved standards of professional behaviour in pursuit of academic excellence amongst the British big cat research community. 
4. To undertake fieldwork on a regularly. 
5. To freely publish data regardless of status and with complete transparency. 
6. To better understand the British ecology of these elusive animals. 
7. To establish a national resource centre where as much information as possible can be gathered together in one place and made freely available. 
8. To provide an unbiased forum for discussion and a ‘neutral’ body for coordination and arbitration. 
9. To examine any evidence submitted by organisations or by private individuals whether photographic, testimonial or biological, and to freely provide scientific results. 
10. To carry out drone surveillance of both contemporary and historical sites of significance in order to gather data for ecological forecasting models.

As regular viewers of On The Track will know, we are in the early stages of carrying out or at least setting up a feasibility study into a research project on the Japanese island of Iriomote. As you probably know, the island is one of the southernmost parts of the Japanese archipelago and home to a unique species of cat Prionailurus iriomotensis which some people believe is a subspecies of the Asian Leopard Cat. It was discovered in 1965 by Tetsuo Koura, who also looked into rumours of a larger mystery cat on the island. If it exists it will almost certainly turn out to be a clouded leopard of some description, but the important thing is to find out to which of the two species of clouded leopards it belongs to. However, as recent evidence has shown, speciation within the clouded leopard complex is not unknown and it could be a new subspecies. If so, what is its relationship to the semi-mythical clouded leopards of Formosa?

We are looking for some volunteers to help put this project together. In the early stages, it will take place completely on social media, but if there is anybody who speaks Japanese or anybody who reads this and has family or friends on Iriomote who wants to have a bash at getting themselves a modicum of zoological immortality, please drop me a line at:

CFZJon@gmail.com