GUEST BLOGGER COLIN HIGGINS: Lovely lampreys

One of my favourite guest blogs over the last few weeks has been Colin Higgins from Yorkshire, who - incidentally - was the winner of the compy in last month's `On the Track`.

As I have written elsewhere his article on the burbot awakened various childhood memories for me.

His article on tench did likewise, because it made me recollect a passage on the subject in T.H.White's glorious `The Sword in the Stone` (don't get me started on the execrable Disney version), and his latest article is no exception. Lampreys were one of my favourite fish when I was a child, and I HAVE kept them as pets, so just for you Colin, there will be some more lamprey related high-jinks in the next few days..

There are few animals so closely associated with regal self-harm as the lamprey. The only culinary surfeit I’ve come close to OD’ing on is Black Jack and Fruit Salad chews one Friday night in the late 60s while listening to Desmond Dekker on my friend Wayne’s Dansette. Henry I dug the taste of petromyzontiformes so much they dug him in return sending the dyspeptic Conqueror’s youngest son to meet his maker (I just get a vestigial sugar rush from early reggae).

Apparently the RAF made the current Queen’s coronation pie from lamprey which may not have been in the best possible taste given its latent regicidal tendencies. I couldn’t say, I’ve never fancied them with peas and chip or sushi style because however you look at it lamprey are very weird indeed.

As the most primitive living vertebrates lamprey go back 450 million years and exist on the very edges of taxonomy under the charmingly titled ‘stone sucker’ group. They have a single nostril on top of their head, a row of gill holes where proper fish have polite covers and a toothed, funnel like mouth with which they relieve other fish of their blood. Zoologically they’re not even true fish but occupy the same general space like an evolutionary remnant, an end-of-roll creature from an earlier earth, a forgotten subject in Darwin’s waiting room.

Although jawless the mouth - which vaguely resembles Flukeman from the X-Files but with extra barbs - has prodigious strength and they’ve been known to carry two pound stones while excavating a trench for spawning by the power of vacuum alone. Follow that Mr Dyson.

There are three British species; the sea lamprey, the river lamprey and brook lamprey. All spawn in freshwater and spend their first 5-8 years there as blind, toothless prides - we used to catch these on the way to school in the mistaken belief they were leeches. Only the brook lamprey spends its short life wholly in freshwater and is non-parasitic, the rest live an anadromous existence feasting on the vital juices of their host sea trout, cod, basking shark or whatever.

There are a few landlocked populations in Finland, Russia and Scotland and when CFZ set out to discover if a giant eel was at the root of lake monster legends it passed through my mind whether a sterile lamprey might be the cause, particularly for the horse-headed attitude eye witnesses sometimes describe.

In a fishing context they are mainly used as dead bait for pike, giving off a gory cloud as an added scent attraction. One always imagines them as a sedentary species but I know a chap who caught a large lamprey, cleanly hooked in the mouth while trolling artificial lures at speed so that primitive cartilagous form is no slouch. Although rare, there are instances of lamprey attack on humans while sea bathing, leaving their trademark seal-stamp marking on the hapless swimmer. “No bite marks officer, but it gave me a nasty suck.” They also have a unique immune system with biomechanical defences to detoxify iron - handy for Top Trumps or Pokemon spin-offs - which along with other bio-armoury makes them an exemplary medical research subject.

Nevertheless because of its decline across Europe, the sea lamprey is now given some legal protection. Failing acquisition of a pangolin, a gremlin or Top Cat, a lamprey is top of my list for future pets. Ugly it may be but it’s also slightly scary and rather cool. I’ll call it Norman De’Ath.