Great news! One of the, frankly, most terrifying creatures I've ever laid eyes on is making a comeback in English rivers. The lamprey, asides from being some kind of monster from a Guillermo del Torro film, is actually very interesting. It is the oldest known vertebrate still alive today having been around for over 350 million years; that's over 100 million years before even the very first dinosaurs evolved. Lampreys are jawless and instead have a circular mouth with row upon row of pointed teeth, see below if you want to have nightmares. Did I mention that they can grow to be a metre long?
Anyway, although they used to be very common and successfully survived hundreds of millions of years of change and upheaval across the planet, in the last couple of hundred years their numbers dwindled over Europe and they are now endangered. However, a project by the Environment Agency has led to increased numbers across parts of northern England. The two main problems the eel-like fish had were pollution and river blockages like weirs and dams. Many UK rivers are now the cleanest they've been since the Industrial Revolution and the blockages are being overcome with the installation of lamprey tiles. These are cheap tiles that have broad based cones sticking up from them that the lampreys can curl around and use to gain purchase as they travel up river.
As unlikely as it seems they are, apparently, delicious to boot. Lamprey pie was a mainstay of royal banquets for a millennium and is still sometimes found today, for example at the Queen's jubilee celebrations in 2012. But be warned, the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon reports that Henry I was killed by consuming 'a surfeit of lampreys' in 1135, a fish that he loved but which 'disagreed with him'.
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| Image used with permission |
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