I experienced this 30 years ago and it still haunts me. In a fascinating way. Such cool creatures.
neilv 12 days ago [-]
IIRC, lampreys are really the stars of the show, upstaging the occasional glimpse of a salmon.
FredPret 13 days ago [-]
They remind me of that monster that jumps on your face in Half Life
RGamma 12 days ago [-]
Head crabs
brozaman 13 days ago [-]
> “In California, we displayed a Pacific lamprey, and a kid from Hoopa tribe said, ‘That looks delicious.’”
Despite looking gross, they are indeed delicious.
swayvil 13 days ago [-]
Little known fact : The Sea Lamprey is incapable of smiling.
type0 13 days ago [-]
Anatomically speaking they don't have a face like vertebrate fishes, so they suckers don't need to be concerned of saving their face about how they live
jefurii 12 days ago [-]
> Long Reviled as 'Ugly,' Sea Lampreys Get Some Respect (2023) (yale.edu)
Wait, does this mean there are also land lampreys??
smegsicle 12 days ago [-]
that doesn't make any sense, would you also say that there should be land stars?
jefurii 12 days ago [-]
I've always heard of lampreys referred to as just "lampreys". Usually when you put a modifier in front of a name it's because you want to distinguish it from the normal, or most common, or the first-discovered thing. Saying "sea lamprey" implies that there are other kinds of lampreys that are not in the sea. I guess there could be fresh-water lampreys of course.
Beautiful: humans, flowers, orchids, bumble bees, butterflies, ladybirds, birds of paradise, big cats...
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!
pinkmuffinere 12 days ago [-]
>Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time.
To be clear, I think you're claiming:
1. beauty _is_ objective
2. this beauty-is-subjective thing is a recent phenomenon
I disagree with both of those claims, but the second one is more interesting to me. At least in the 1700's some people believed that beauty is subjective [1]. But perhaps you consider the 1700's recent?
Agreed, people in the modern world are very uncomfortable acknowledging beauty isn't some fully subjective thing
runsfromfire 13 days ago [-]
This makes me sad HBO cancelled Raised by Wolves
rob74 13 days ago [-]
TL/DR: where sea lampreys have been part of the ecosystem for a long time, they are a valuable part of that ecosystem. Where they are an invasive species, they disrupt ecosystems and can nearly wipe out fish species that haven't co-evolved with them - but that doesn't mean the goal should be to exterminate them everywhere.
HaHaHackerNews 13 days ago [-]
[dead]
lancesells 13 days ago [-]
> recognizing the ecological importance of lampreys in their native waters and are stepping up efforts to help them recover
After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?
coldtea 13 days ago [-]
Why would the years of life on earth (or evolution) matter for species alive today being of "ecological importance" or not?
Ecological importance is more about the role they play, and whether it's essential or inessential, and if the former if it can be easily substituted by another species or mechanism.
mandmandam 13 days ago [-]
> Why would the years of life on earth (or evolution) matter for species alive today being of "ecological importance" or not?
It matters because we're not that smart. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons. Not just to the species itself, which you seem to discount despite their ancient pedigree, but even to us through second order effects.
The amount of time a species has been around is a strong clue that they're fulfilling a role in the ecosystem. Nature doesn't really do 'superfluous'; everything connects. Not in a hippy dippy way, but in the realest way, and in ways beyond our comprehension. The classic examples when I was growing up of 'nature being wasteful' - the appendix and 'junk DNA' - have now been revised... Because we learned more.
No one knew how wolves change rivers [0] until it was studied. In hindsight it's obvious and makes perfect sense, but we didn't deem wolves "essential" when we killed them all.
>It matters because we don't know so much. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons
Sure, but that's an argument for "evolution being so complex and long process, we don't know much about which species is essential or not".
Not for the original claim "After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?" which seems to imply that all/most specific are of ecological importance just because they're old, except maybe some more recent ones like primates.
mandmandam 13 days ago [-]
The two claims are basically saying the same thing. You can't deny one and not the other.
Evolution has taken place over billions and billions of years in a system that's far beyond our comprehension in complexity.
Evolving - or even not evolving - in this system over billions of years and surviving implies importance. I can't say it guarantees that a species is "essential", but that was never the argument.
Propelloni 13 days ago [-]
This implies that a certain ecological state is preferable to another one and maintaining this state requires some essential actor. This makes sense from an anthropocentric point of view but I doubt that evolutionary processes work that way.
13 days ago [-]
Rendered at 04:01:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOX7QQJyvjc
Despite looking gross, they are indeed delicious.
Wait, does this mean there are also land lampreys??
https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-surfeit-of-...
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!
To be clear, I think you're claiming:
1. beauty _is_ objective
2. this beauty-is-subjective thing is a recent phenomenon
I disagree with both of those claims, but the second one is more interesting to me. At least in the 1700's some people believed that beauty is subjective [1]. But perhaps you consider the 1700's recent?
[1] https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/david-hume-beauty
After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?
Ecological importance is more about the role they play, and whether it's essential or inessential, and if the former if it can be easily substituted by another species or mechanism.
It matters because we're not that smart. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons. Not just to the species itself, which you seem to discount despite their ancient pedigree, but even to us through second order effects.
The amount of time a species has been around is a strong clue that they're fulfilling a role in the ecosystem. Nature doesn't really do 'superfluous'; everything connects. Not in a hippy dippy way, but in the realest way, and in ways beyond our comprehension. The classic examples when I was growing up of 'nature being wasteful' - the appendix and 'junk DNA' - have now been revised... Because we learned more.
No one knew how wolves change rivers [0] until it was studied. In hindsight it's obvious and makes perfect sense, but we didn't deem wolves "essential" when we killed them all.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws
Sure, but that's an argument for "evolution being so complex and long process, we don't know much about which species is essential or not".
Not for the original claim "After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?" which seems to imply that all/most specific are of ecological importance just because they're old, except maybe some more recent ones like primates.
Evolution has taken place over billions and billions of years in a system that's far beyond our comprehension in complexity.
Evolving - or even not evolving - in this system over billions of years and surviving implies importance. I can't say it guarantees that a species is "essential", but that was never the argument.