Lampreys Should Adopt New Marketing Strategy

“To our knowledge these are the first in-situ observations of such behaviour during which one can convincingly state that lampreys attached to whales are rasping through the skin and feeding rather than just ‘hanging on for the ride’.”
— Owen Nichols, Director of the Marine Fisheries Initiative at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, discusses a less-than-earth-shattering discovery. (Why wouldn’t we have assumed that lampreys like cetacean blood as much as that of fish?) But, the news is a good excuse to watch a video of the things. They are super-weird and cool-looking. They should change their nickname, though. “Vampire fish” is so 2009. They should start rolling their eyes back in their heads, and holding their fins out all rigid and straight and call themselves “zombie fish.” It’s all about zombies now.