Encyclopedia of Life Blog

This is a dramatization of real predator-prey events, some names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Imagine a lovely dolphin, we’ll call him Kyle, swimming fast and free through north Atlantic coastal waters, he darts and flips through the waves, laughing with the seagulls and pausing a moment near the shore to blow perfectly circular underwater bubbles. Suddenly he feels a gentle touch at his side, a slight pain but nothing serious, he goes on his merry way without realizing that it has just recieved a kiss of a slow painful death.

Attached to Kyle’s side is a long dark eel-like creature, what is it? What is it doing? Friends, meet a vampire more ancient than any yet imagined, a creature that has been sucking the blood of innocents since the Devonian period, about 365 million years ago, meet the Lamprey.

(photo by Brian Morland)

As Kyle goes about his day, he is now not skipping so freshly through the waves. His new parasite has latched on and has ground its raspy tongue through his skin, injecting anticoagulant, and slowly, sucking the life blood out of him. Our Dolphin buddy feels tired, drowsy, it gets harder and harder to swim and just when the Lamprey is satiated and lets go, Kyle looses consciousness and sinks to the ocean floor. Here is a video of the horrors to follow:

(photo from Hagfish Research site)

Now Kyle is dead. But his corpse will go on to meet the lamprey’s just-as-ancient cousin, the hagfish. They swarm to him, attracted by the blood oozing from his open lamprey wound. A hagfish will wedge its head into the wound and securely hold on while the rest of its eel like body ties itself into a knot (see above picture). Then, it moves the knot along its body to pull a chunk of flesh out of Kyle’s side. Slowly hagfish work their way deeper into Kyle’s body, finally disappearing to eat Kyle’s delectable insides.

This dramatization only touches on a few of the gross, and interesting things about these two related creatures, who often work in tandem by default.

Lampreys and hagfishes are unusual, jaw-less fish that feature circular shaped mouths lined with hooks and rough teeth. There are 41 species of lampreys and approximately 35 species of hagfishes and slime hags. Very similar in appearance to eels (but different in every other way) they have no scales and are covered with a slimy slimy mucous. Their mucous serves to protect them from predators, and when attacked they can produce an enormous amount of it. An adult hagfish can secrete enough mucous to turn a 20 litre bucket of water into slime in a matter of minutes.

Here is a slime video.

Almost all of the jawless vertebrates became extinct by the end of the Devonian period about 365 million years ago, except ancestors of these killers, who persisted happily, no jaws, no problem.  They both sport cartilaginous skeletons even today, making them living evidence of the evolution of the spine (very important for us).

If you thought this was creepy, check out this amazing list of freaky creatures!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Biodiversity Synthesis Group, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.