Sympathy for the Lamprey

"Lampreys don't charm most people," begins a pamphlet from the Minnesota Sea Grant.

Truer words, my environmental research friends, truer words.

Yes, it's hard out there for a lamprey. Already cursed with a face not even their mothers (who die shortly after spawning) could love, these fish were further saddled with 50 years of bad PR brought on when one invasive species, the sea lamprey, moved into the Great Lakes and wreaked a trail of parasitic havoc from New York to Minnesota. Lost in the shuffle were several native lamprey species, some of which aren't even parasitic. Despite living in the Great Lakes for 1000s of years in co-evolved cooperation with other fish, non-invasive lamprey have paid the price for their cousin's misdeeds.

The problem stems from the (really fascinating) lamprey life cycle. Instead of having a short childhood and many years of maturity, lamprey basically spend most of their lives as larvae, buried in the mud at the bottom of stream beds*. They survive this way, feeding on microorganisms filtered out of the water, for anywhere from three to seven years, depending on the species. (Insert your own joke about college students here.) The adult stage of life, in contrast, can be as short as a single breeding season. In fact, some non-parasitic species don't even eat after becoming adults. Their digestive tracts just wither away and they use stored fat for energy during the short time they have left on Earth.

Lamprey's bottom-feeding phase basically creates a captive audience, in so much as "captive audience" means "conveniently having lots of lamprey in one place so you can poison them."

Now, before you call PETA, there's a good reason for the lampreycide. Sea lamprey are an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes probably around the 1930s, when canals were opened allowing the lamprey to swim around Niagara Falls. Sea lamprey are big, and hungry, feasting on the blood of fish. And, for all but the largest fish, the embrace of the sea lamprey usually means death. (Native parasitic lamprey, by contrast, are much smaller and usually don't kill fish.) The Departments of Natural Resources in several states have been poisoning the streams favored by invasive sea lamprey larvae in order to save native fish since the 1950s.

The good news: The poison used is pretty lamprey specific and (again, because of that long larval cycle) DNR officials usually only need to poison a given stream once every four years or so.

The bad news: The poison will also kill native lamprey (which often live in the mud alongside the sea lamprey). The natives haven't been driven to the point of species endangerment by lamprey poisonings, says Phil Cochran, lamprey expert and chair of biology at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. But geographic populations of these friendly, neighborhood lamprey have been threatened, and even wiped out.

So, over the last several decades, the DNR has been working to improve their aim, using both new control methods and a better understanding of native lamprey habitats. For instance, Cochran says, today we know that native lamprey often live further upstream than sea lamprey, so control crews can apply the poison at a point in the stream where it won't affect most of the native larvae.

And new, poison-free, methods of control are under research. One idea is to catch male sea lamprey and chemically sterilize them. "You release those males into wild populations and they dilute the breeding effort," says Cochran. "It will take a while to see whether this works with sea lamprey, but it's been used successfully on insects before."

Pheromones are also a possibility. Adult lamprey are attracted to chemicals released by larval lamprey. In fact, Cochran says these chemical signals might be the thing that helps lamprey make their way from lakes to the breeding grounds in streams. Scientists don't yet know whether these chemicals are specific to species but, if they are, they could be used to lure sea lamprey into a trap. (Insert Admiral Akbar joke here.)

*I, for one, will be thinking twice about squishing my toes through the mud at the bottom of stream beds from now on.

Image courtesy Flickr user edans, via CC.

• [bjacques]

  It’s the singing lamprey from LARD!

  The Power…of LARD!

• [Ambiguity]

  I’m not trying to be vulgar, but you have to admit- it looks like a vagina full of teeth. There’s even some sort of formation at the top of the head that could resemble a clitoris.

  Gee, uh… thanks for pointing that out.

  • [Anonymous]

    maybe an obstetric view of a unicorn could chase that image away.

• [Anonymous]

  You know those old wives tales about how vagina have teeth to ward men off from raping girls (among many other old myths to also achieve the same idea). That was my first reaction to the picture…I’m not trying to be vulgar, but you have to admit- it looks like a vagina full of teeth. There’s even some sort of formation at the top of the head that could resemble a clitoris. Nature is strange.

  As if I didn’t have enough problems (i.e. 1. finding a woman who I liked who liked me, 2. finding said woman would have sexual intercourse with me, 3. be able to achieve/and maintain a erection for said intercourse.) you through this mental handicap in the way!

• [Anonymous]

  Oh. My. God.

  It’s a Sarlac.

• [Anonymous]

  God gives nuts to people without teeth…

  Lamprey are the most expensive and apreciated delicacy you can find in the rivers of Portugal. Every year I DREAM with the spring months, so that I can feast with some “Lamprey’s rice” or “Bordalesa Lamprey”.
  The singularity of the taste of a well prepared lamprey is comparable to that of Trufles or Caviar…

  My fellow americans, don’t poison Lamprey’s… Eat them! :)

• [gerta]

  Please don’t call them prehistoric. They’re no more prehistoric than we — only their ancestors (like ours, including the one we share with lampreys) are prehistoric.

  But I agree lampreys are pretty damn cool. Too bad they get a bum rap.

  • [danlalan]

    Please don’t call them prehistoric.

    Until lampreys start writing history, they’re all prehistoric. ;-)

• [Birdseed]

  I love lampreys! They taste really interesting, very different from other fish. In northern Sweden river lampreys are fished, smoked, and then cooked with cream to make a gorgeous and very unusual dish.

• [JMG]

  I did some Ice Diving on Lake Champlain in Vermont years ago. During the winter, under the ice, the fish are sluggish enough that you can easily reach out and grab them; as such, we did our part to combat what we were told were invasive lampreys by pulling them off the fish and taking them out of the water (and we also had a little fun with the suckers – pun intended). Reading this, I hope they weren’t native lampreys, but I suppose our local divemasters probably knew what they were talking about.

• [Talia]

  I am going to have nightmares forever after that picture. Its good to know I can always count on BB for my daily dose of mental trauma! :p

• [an0nymous]

  I used to swim in Lake Michigan and these things featured prominently in several dark scenarios I had worked out in the back of the noggin. Sorry to break up the love-parade, but this shit is a Lovecraftian horror-fest.
  One of the few species I actually feel emnity towards.

• [Anonymous]

  Like the romans 1000 years ago, here in Galicia we continue to eat these delicious parasites, with rice and
  a dark sauce prepared with the animal´s blood. It´s really tasty! (and quite expensive).

• [knodi]

  PETA started a campaign to rename them “Sea Ticks”. Because…. nevermind. That was funnier in my head. Oh well, too late, already typed it *SUBMIT*

• [Anonymous]

  Gerta, can you say more about your position regarding the matter of whether or not lampreys are “prehistoric” animals? They have been around a lot longer than our species.

  http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=50970

  “Biologists are interested in the sea lamprey partly because of its alternating lifestyles, but largely because it represents a living fossil from around the time vertebrates originated. Close relatives of sea lampreys were on earth before the dinosaurs. It’s possible that the sea lamprey’s dynamic genome biology might someday be traced back in evolutionary history to a point near, and perhaps including, a common ancestor of all vertebrates living today, the authors of the study noted.”

• [Anonymous]

  @BirdSee In Galicia we cook (in its own blood)[1] and eat lampreys too.

  [1] http://www.spain.info/TourSpain/Gastronomia/Productos%20y%20Recetas/Recetas/M/0/Lamprea%20del%20Mino%20%28bordelesa%20en%20su%20sangre%29

• [Snig]

  They need to make a Disney movie featuring a local lamprey as the hero, only then will they be loved. Lovecraftian is right, they do give one the heebies.

• [ROSSINDETROIT]

  I’ve fished the Great Lakes and have seen the horrible damage that the parasitic ones can do to a salmon or lake trout. It’s an image you can’t un-see.
  OTOH, invasive alewife fish are cute. For Christmas I bought the family coat pins made from dried alewives cast in acrylic. If you’re from the Mitten State you get that one.

• [Darwindr]

  Great story Maggie, sorry we are picking apart your phrases, but evolution is really hard to write about while avoiding inaccurate statements, but…

  Technically all living things with backbones are “descendants of some of Earth’s first vertebrates”. And I second Gerta’s comment about prehistoric. Their basic morphology hasn’t changed much, but they have continued to evolve. They don’t even really qualify as living fossils since there are so many kinds. An evolutionary biologist would call them plesiomorphic.

  Let’s just call their appearance old and freaky-lookin.

  • [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

    That’s fair. The wording isn’t getting across quite what I wanted it to–and is getting across something inaccurate. I’ll play with some edits here in a little bit.

    Thanks!

• [Allegra]

  Lampreys can be pests, or they can be an endangered species. This species of vegetarian Lamprey grows in one watershed on Vancouver Island, in BC., and is a wonderful poke in the eye for creationists because it’s speciating right frikkin’ now. More deets on the Morrison Creek Lamprey at the link.

  http://epleasures.startlogic.com/morrisoncreek/?page_id=34

• [Karl Jones]

  “If I come back as an animal in my next lifetime, I hope it’s some type of parasite, because this is the part where I take it EASY!”

  - Jack Handey

• [edans]

  Heyyy, that’s my picture! Who would have told that poor, captive lamprey in the Balneario de Mondariz (Galicia, Spain) that it was going to reach such a milestone in web fame!!

  A great honor to see one of my pictures featured in Boing Boing, and thanks a lot for the proper credit. A nice case to illustrate the value of Creative Commons licenses ;-)

• [desiredusername]

  Hmm..thanks for pointing me in this direction. What I have learned since you posted is very interesting.

  Lampreys are not considered true fish but rather a taxon of jawless “fishes” most of which are extinct, called Cephalaspidomorphs. This placement among an extinct taxon group from the Silurian and Devonian eras also places them as the only known extension of that extinct group into the present day. Perhaps that is where the “prehistoric” qualifier came from.

  It is also one of the few organisms that we have the complete genome sequence for. We have been sequencing organisms based upon either their economic value, or in this case their scientific value. In the case of the sea lamprey it is the insights into the evolution of the adaptive immune system that has created genomic curiosity.

  Thanks for the lamprey awareness, Maggie.

• [Brainspore]

  The vast majority of organisms on earth are parasites. Parasitic lampreys just get a bad rap because they don’t have the common decency to stay out of sight. Life is icky!

• [Moriarty]

  For a weirdo species that looks like a terrible ancient alien but is actually totally harmless, I like horseshoe crabs. In addition to their appearance, they’re cool in other ways, like having copper-based blood, the ability to heal after ridiculously catastrophic injuries, and, like lampreys, they are ridiculously old: almost completely unchanged in the last 230 million years (and having the same general form for 440 million).

  • [katt191]

    You know those old wives tales about how vagina have teeth to ward men off from raping girls (among many other old myths to also achieve the same idea). That was my first reaction to the picture…I’m not trying to be vulgar, but you have to admit- it looks like a vagina full of teeth. There’s even some sort of formation at the top of the head that could resemble a clitoris. Nature is strange.

• [thorn]

  My favorite ever museum placard copy came from a Great Lakes Fisheries Exhibit at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, which I last saw in about 1988.

  “The sea lamprey is a large, eel-like fish, with a mouth on it that could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”

• [edans]

  By the way, lampreys in Galicia are usually prepared “a la bordelesa” (Bordeaux style), cooked in their own blood. Heavy stuff only suitable for a highly tolerant stomach, but definitely worth tasting…

  • [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

    I saw pictures of that on Flickr, too. Not sure whether those were yours. I…

    I think I may be too American to eat that. And that fact shames me.

    The problem is, it’s not even one of those dishes you could be like, “Don’t tell me what it is until after I’ve eaten half the plate.” ‘Cause, you know, it looks like lampreys in blood.

• [Anonymous]

  As an immunologist, I find lampreys to be fascinating.

  http://blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/2009/05/the-lampreys-alternative-immun.html

• [Moriarty]

  Fun fact from Wikipedia: Henry I’s official cause of death was eating too many lampreys.

• [Steve Schnier]

  Or, we could combine Lamprey and Human DNA to produce a race of… Lawyers.

• [Dewi Morgan]

  Beautiful: elements of Lovecraft, Jabba the Hutt’s Sarlac, and vagina-dentata, all in one.

• [daen]

  I’m surprised no-one has done the “surfeit of lamprey” jokes yet … (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England)

• [Anonymous]

  They’re prehistoric in the sense that they’ve remained essentially unchanged for a ridiculously long period of time. They also represent one of the only surviving species linking vertebrates and nonverterates (a distinction they share with the hagfish, which is a similarly weird and loathesome creature).