Animal Planet: more about the lamprey

And so, life goes on...

The “Man-Eating Super Wolves” have certainly made a reaction, just not the one that AP was probably aiming for – quite a few people and organizations (like Colorado Fish & Wildlife Center, to name one) are upset for their depiction of wolves as man-eaters. “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” (or super squid, or anything else) is one thing – there are plenty of fictional man-eaters, and wild cats infested with zombie virus are not that different.

The wolf situation is. There has been a time, and not too long ago, when wolves were considered man-eaters and were shot and destroyed by people accordingly – and it seems as if AP is trying to bring this time back. Strange, really, because AP is AP, and should be pro-animal, rather than pro-hunting, but there it is.

Anyways, the wolf situation has been measured and reacted against – there are petitions going around to forbid AP from showing “super wolves” and the like – so let us talk about lampreys and their blood lake.

The lampreys, as well as their cousins the hagfish, belong to jawless fish, the oldest group of vertebrate animals in the world. To use the term ‘vertebrate’ in relation to this duo is tricky – neither lamprey nor hagfish have actual bones, and some scientists actually think that the hagfish are invertebrates, just like the insects, the squid and the earthworm, and thus they are not related even to the lampreys. But let us ignore this for simplicity’s sake.

AP’s new monster movie about the lampreys made them a super-predator, almost like the shark with their sucker-like jaws, studded with teeth, looking rather leech-like. In the movie, the lampreys also behaved leech-like, not just getting out of water, but also crawling up the walls using the suckers. That does not work. The lampreys are not leeches; they are fish (technically speaking), and they cannot exist outside water. That is one.

Two, is that lampreys do not quite suck – they rasp. The adult lampreys are predators, they hunt fish that is sick, or weak, or injured, or somehow else incapacitated, (or else already dead): they grab it with their sucker-like mouths and begin to make holes into its flesh that they swallow completely. They do not attack warm-blooded animals, including humans, of course, and their larvae feed on plankton that is carried on the currents of water: they make burrows in sand and they live there – they are poor swimmers, even worse than their parents are.

The lampreys (and the hagfish, but they are trickier) don’t have any bones, but they do have a notochord that acts as a backbone – in some ways they are similar to Haikouichthys and Cephalaspis that were featured in the first episode of Walking with Monsters (2005). Unlike Cephalaspis and others (Ptersapis, Psammolepis, Drepanaspis, etc), they do not have any armor; they do not have any limbs either, but the lampreys, at least, are edible to humans, especially smoked.

The heyday of the jawless fish was the Silurian and the Devonian – they were never very large (about 20 cm long on average) and never too successful: first the sea scorpions and then the true, jawed fish dominated them and ate them. None of them survived the end of the Palaeozoic...but the lamprey and the hagfish did. Those basic, unarmored (save for the slime), homely models of evolution made it for millions of years until the present.

As one can see, the lamprey (and the hagfish) already has quite a few interesting facts and qualities behind them to make a documentary presentation, (as it was also done on River Monsters S5,) and AP did not have to air a sci-fi/horror film to make them attractive and interesting to their audience. But nevertheless they did. Sucks to be them, period.