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.

Animal Planet: from fact to fiction

And so, Animal Planet has brought us another Monster Week, which features the following pearls of bad television:

- “Man-Eating Zombie Cats”. The virus is turning wild cats, from wildcats to Siberian tigers, into man-attacking zombies. Basically, this is your typical lousy zombie flick, with a wildlife twist, where the ‘others’ (to use a genre term), are not just zombies, but also carnivorous mammals, predators, and thus – doubly dangerous. This idea is an old one – mankind has feared big predators – lions, wolves, tigers, bears, sharks, crocodiles, etc – since it was represented by australopithecines that just came down from trees. Ok. This idea got augmented by another old chestnut – that only mentally sick, unstable animals will attack the humans, who are kings (and queens) of beasts. Again, that is nothing new. But – where’s the educational angle in all of this? “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” seeks to purely entertain, tuning in with humanity’s oldest (and currently incorrect) fears. AP, can you hear me?

- “Man-Eating Super Wolves” or something along that line. According to this idea, wolves are beginning to starve and are starting to attack people. Again, this is an old idea, used by natives of Europe, North America, and possibly Asia, to justify their killings of wolves. The wolves (including werewolves) were some of the oldest villains in humanity’s history (and villains’ minions – remember the original ‘Dracula’ novel, for example?) and what AP does here is bring up an old literary/movie cliché yet again. Bravo! But there is a twist:

Currently, the American (and also Canadian, and European) society is divided into pro-wolf and anti-wolf camps. These camps are not all encompassing, of course, but they are well-known and well-established, and they are trying to recruit and influence people into their directions; AP’s special on man-eating wolves plays into the anti-wolf camp, of course, a rather strange site for a TV channel that is named Animal Planet.

Admittedly, this departure from the channel’s animal roots has went on for the last years, when AP began to air less wild nature shows, and more shows like “Tanked”, “My Cat from Hell” and “Too Cute”, which deal with pets. History’s “Swamp People”, or now-gone “MonsterQuest”, have more wild nature in them, than most of AP’s current shows, to say nothing of Discovery Channel or BBC. There was a time when AP featured wildlife, not just domestic, and some shows – like River Monsters – still do, but they are in minority: AP is steadily moving away from the wild into domestic, from educational into entertaining, and it shows no signs of stopping.

- The current peak of this trend became currently embodied by the film about lampreys, “The Blood Lake”. Made by The Asylum, the same company that made “Sharknado”, this is fiction, clearly and honestly: AP itself acknowledged that it was fiction (the incident after the mermaid duology and “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives”, where some misunderstanding about the docufiction nature of those films occurred remained fresh in AP’s collective mind, it seems), which means that it has basically abandoned the documentary genres and is filming and airing fiction, and fiction alone. 

Question: does AP think that it will be able to compete with other purely fiction channels, such as SyFy and Spike successfully? They have been in this field far longer than AP did, and pet- and pet-related shows are poor aides in this endeavor further. At least “Lost Tapes” are gone, so that is good...

Conclusion: AP has gone from documentary to docufiction/fiction channel with an animal flavor. This is a dark day for all wild animal lovers indeed!

RM - Vampires of the Deep

In this week's episode JW chose to investigate the so-called "vampires of the deep" - the little known and enigmatic lampreys.

What does a lay person know about the lamprey? Probably little to nothing. The lamprey (and its cousin the hagfish) are the only jawless fish in the world; technically they belong to the vertebrate group, but in reality they have no bones, and have survived almost unchanged since the dawn of time. Impossible Pictures' mini-series "Walking with Monsters" (2005) feature two kinds of jawless fish: unarmored (Haikouichthys) and armored (Cephalaspis). Neither had any mouths and fed by sucking in various edible debris from the sea floor. The lamprey larvae feed in the same manner; the lamprey adults are active predators instead. Personally, I doubt that JW attaching an adult sea lamprey to his neck was a good idea, but that's why JW is the man, on the other hand...

The lamprey's natural history aside, was "VotD" an exciting episode? Yes. For one thing, there were plenty of fish species and fish catching featured in this episode. True, there were flashbacks to episodes past, but at a tolerable level still - no "Colombian slasher" this episode, no sir! JW's attempts at making suspense, on the other hand, were annoying, and at a level with "Atomic Assassin": pointless, for anyone with some logic and knowledge of the natural world would figure out the attacker's lamprey identity early in the episode.

But there was another tie to "Atomic Assassin" and similar episodes (such as "Russian Killer" from S4) - the ecological one, the impact of humans on nature. On one hand we have an infestation of sea lampreys in lake Champlain caused by human meddling, and on the other - there's the rapidly falling number of Pacific lampreys caused by the same meddling. This human factors transforms "VotD" from a very good into a really great one - it is particularly interesting to observe JW aid the Native Americans assisting the Pacific lamprey in utilizing the so-called 'lamprey ladder' to get to their spawning ground...

Thus, it is safe to say that in the end "Vampires of the Deep" was a very good episode, if not downright great: the only flaws was the pointless 'guessing game' of JW in the first third of the episode, and the unresolved question as to why the greater redhorse (the catfish caught in this episode) actually went after live prey (a fishing lure actually), showing behavior atypical to this species. Ah well, not even JW had time to solve and uncover everything in a single episode... Maybe next time. Lol.