Source is SHARKEEE ON TWITTER who posts tons of original amazing wildlife shots and videos but I needed to show you what lamprey look like mating, you won’t regret it especially not when one of them is still so worked up it starts swinging a boulder around with its face
After hiding under the substrate at a fish research center for nearly 7 years as larvae, Pacific lamprey EMERGED as juveniles with eyes and a suction disk mouth!
These fish, which are of Tribal and ecological importance, are now ready for their journey out to sea!
The Abernathy Fish Technology Center in Washington worked in collaboration with the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Chelan County Public Utility District to conduct this research to further understand and conserve Pacific lamprey.
This is a rare accomplishment to have Pacific lamprey reared and transformed in a captive setting.
Hey there folks! If you've been following my twitter and instagram, for this Mermay, my theme is to basically take inspiration from real life biology, and apply them to their design as merfolk... especially their wicked set of chompers. It got so popular on Insta, I even made backstories for their designs there xD.
You can read up more about their stories on my Insta, but the gist is this: Kara is a Great White Shark mermaid, and she does her best to look out for her sister, a Lamprey. She lives in a town full of quirky characters, whose merfolk come from multiple kinds of fish and critters of the sea.
ghost lamprey subspecies >:) Literally vamp fish that also bites rocks lol. Parasitic predator (mainly on slow leviathans) but escapable if given cool rocks. Few words other than screeches, gurgles and hisses dfgdfg. defs a loz enemy
A trio of paleontologists, two with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the third with Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, UMR, has found the fossilized remains of two large lamprey species from the Jurassic in northeast China. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Feixiang Wu, Philippe Janvier and Chi Zhang describe the site where the fossils were found, their condition, and features of the ancient lampreys.
Prior research has shown that lampreys—eel-like, jawless, aquatic vertebrates with sucker-like mouths—first evolved approximately 360 million years ago. They still exist today in many of the world's oceans and some fresh-water environments. During their early development, they were small, only a few centimeters long. Over time, they have grown much larger—some modern species grow to over a meter long.
Little is known about the evolutionary history of the creatures due to the rarity of fossil finds. In this new study, the researchers found two fossils representing two species that date back approximately 160 million years—a find that helps to fill in some gaps in the lamprey's history.