Title: Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus)
The place it lives: Freshwater and marine ecosystems within the North Pacific, from California to Alaska, and throughout the Bering Sea to Russia and Japan
What it eats: The blood and physique fluids of different fish, together with Pacific salmon, flatfish, rockfish and Pacific hake
Why it is superior: Lampreys belong to a gaggle of historical, jawless fish that advanced over 450 million years in the past in the course of the Ordovician interval (485 million to 444 million years in the past). There are roughly 40 residing species of lampreys dotted the world over. These eel-like creatures had been darting up and down streams lengthy earlier than dinosaurs and even timber existed, and have survived a minimum of 4 mass extinctions.
Associated: Barreleye fish: The deep-sea weirdo with rotating eyes and a see-through head
Pacific lampreys are boneless fish, and their skeletons are made solely of cartilage. As a substitute of a jaw, they’ve a sucker mouth rimmed with tooth, which they use to latch onto prey and extract blood and physique fluids. So far as scientists can inform, lampreys don’t eat flesh.
Females lay as much as 200,000 eggs in nests that they incubate in contemporary water for 3 to 4 weeks. As soon as the larvae hatch, they burrow into the sediment and stay buried for as much as a decade. They emerge as juveniles and migrate downstream to the ocean to feed, solely returning to freshwater habitats a number of years later to breed. Adults, which develop as much as 33 inches (84 centimeters) lengthy, can journey lots of of miles inland searching for the right spawning and rearing spot.
Pacific lampreys are very fascinating prey for a lot of species of birds, mammals and fish as a result of their extraordinarily fatty flesh, which incorporates three to 5 occasions as many energy by weight as salmon. As such, they play an vital function in freshwater and marine ecosystems.