Sweden Protected A Lake Monster For Nineteen Years. One Sentence Ended It.

ÖSTERSUND, Sweden — The order covered the animal, its eggs, and any nest it might make.

It was signed by a county administrative board on 14 May 1986, it applied to the whole of Storsjön, and it stood for nineteen years.

We asked for the case file. It came back in nine days, unredacted, 41 pages.

What is in the forty-one pages

A drafting memo of 12 May 1986. Two internal notes from 1987. A complaint from a resident, November 1994. A legal opinion of 8 September 2005. And the order itself, which is one page and protects three things: the animal, the eggs, the nest.

The memo is the story.

The raft

In March 1986 a salvage operator applied to break up a submerged timber raft in the north basin using six explosive charges of 400 grammes each.

The board did not want those charges detonated there. Page three of the memo says why, in a sentence with nothing in it about a monster: the freshwater pearl mussel bed the board wished to protect had not been surveyed to the standard section 7 required, and could not be listed until it was.

A species protection order over an animal already famous enough to be on the county's coat of arms could be drafted in an afternoon. It was.

Dr. Anneli Voskuijl-Brandt, a malacologist who has surveyed the north basin twice, says the bed is real and small. At the 1989 survey there were freshwater pearl mussels at two of five stations, the oldest shell aged at 96 years. Six charges in that water, she says, would have been the end of it.

The salvage application was withdrawn four weeks after the order. The withdrawal letter gives no reason, and we cannot close that gap: sequence is not cause.

The bed was surveyed in 1989. The board issued nothing on the back of it. The 1986 order simply stayed.

The complaint nobody acted on

In November 1994 a resident wrote to ask what the board intended to do about boats trawling the north basin in breach of the order.

The internal note attached to his letter runs to two sentences. No enforcement action is contemplated. No enforcement action is possible.

He wrote again in 1996. There is no reply in the file, and the board tells us none was sent.

One sentence

The 2005 opinion runs to four pages and turns on that line.

Without a type specimen — a held, described, deposited animal — the entry had never met the statutory test for listing a species, and had therefore never been enforceable against anybody, at any point, from the day it was signed.

Agneta Hjortsberg-Ruus, who wrote it, told us it took her an afternoon and that she had expected somebody to argue with her. Nobody did.

The order was repealed on 1 December 2005. In nineteen years it produced no prosecution, no inspection and no specimen.

What the desk takes from it

Sweden did not protect a lake monster. A county board protected a mussel bed it was not yet allowed to name, using the fastest instrument on the shelf, and the instrument happened to be a monster.

That is a better story than the one told about this lake for nineteen years, and it sat in a public file the whole time. This desk has argued before, over a sonar contact in another lake, that the interesting document is almost never the one about the animal.

It cost us one e-mail and nine days. Ms. Hjortsberg-Ruus points out below, correctly, that three people had asked before us in thirty-nine years, and that two of them were students.