Imagine adding several rings of pointed teeth to a vacuum hose and you've probably got a fairly good idea of what a lamprey looks like.
These ancient fish have been on the planet since before the time of the dinosaurs – but scientists in Australia just made an incredible new discovery when they found these fish in a totally unexpected place.
Lampreys have an eel-like body with no scales or jaws. “Instead of a ‘normal’ mouth they have a round, sucker-like disc lined with sharp little teeth, which many species use to feed on the blood and tissue of fish,” says Dr. Luke Carpenter-Bundhoo, an aquatic ecologist at Griffith University.
“Despite looking like a little vampire, Australian brook lamprey are filter feeders as juveniles, then totally stop eating as adults.”
Carpenter-Bundhoo started noticing lampreys during surveys on K’gari (formerly known as Fraser Island) off the east coast of Australia, much further north than the species had been recorded.
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Carpenter-Bundhoo was flabbergasted at what he found. “After sampling this type of habitat for a few years, I was pretty confident in my knowledge of fish species on K’gari, and then suddenly a species popped up that I had never seen before,” he says. “I knew it was a lamprey, but I had no idea what kind, or that they even occurred at these latitudes.”
He heard that another scientist, David Moffatt, had also found lampreys on the mainland in Queensland. They decided to team up and worked together to confirm their suspicion: this species of lamprey was living more than 860 miles further north than anyone had realised. Their discovery was published in Endangered Species Research in 2024.
“This didn’t just contradict what we knew about the Australian brook lamprey, it contradicts what we knew about all lampreys,” he says. “Prior to this, lampreys were thought to be anti-tropical.”
The researchers hope that a better understanding of where the lampreys live will help protect the endangered species, particularly given that sea level rises might cause the coastal streams it lives in to become saltwater habitats.
“Aside from being the right thing to do, protecting lampreys also means protecting potential future discoveries in neuroscience and evolutionary biology,” says Carpenter-Bundhoo. Studying these alien-looking creatures can help researchers understand the healing process and has even helped further research exploring spinal cord regeneration.
There are five species of lamprey in the southern hemisphere and Australian brook lamprey (Mordacia praecox) are listed as endangered. “It is thought to be extinct in its originally discovered range [in southern New South Wales] from the 1960s, but now that we’ve found them up here in the north, we have a second chance to save the species,” he says.
Carpenter-Bundhoo is excited by this second chance, adding: “This is not an opportunity we often get as conservationists, and certainly not one to be wasted.”
Top image: K’gari in Australia. Credit: Getty
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