#Things that marked me as a weird biologist: this is a big one XD

[miraphoenix]

*kicks down your front door* LAMPREY STORY????

So I guess I haven't! Fun!

tw: discussion of dead animals, and later animal death

Alright, so when I was 14, first year of high school, I had a delightful biology teacher, a real-life Ms. Frizzle kind of person. And she had us do a trout-in-the-classroom kind of project, which means we had a 50-gallon tank full of cold water in the room. I got--and get, we've stayed in touch--along great with her, and I also managed her fish tanks.

She was also the kind of person you'd bring weird animals to, live or dead, so when another teacher walked in one day with a 5-gallon bucket, I knew I was in for a treat.

Inside the bucket, was a lamprey.

Now, where I went to school, Pacific lamprey are invasive. You are obligated by law to stop them from getting back into the waterways if you catch one, and this teacher had caught one along with a lake trout over the weekend. Instead of disposing of the lamprey, however, he brought it into my biology teacher, thinking that she might want to keep it.

She looked at me. I looked at her. And together we looked at the 50-gallon tank full of chilled, lake-temperature water.

So now we have a lamprey. The trout were less than a finger's length long, too small for a lamprey that was several feet long. So the question became; what do you feed a lamprey? It didn't respond to horse or sheep placenta, courtesy of my teacher's freezer. When we got fresh fish and beef, it also didn't seem interested.

So one morning, I got a bright idea. I got a biology stock cart, and put a 15-gallon tank onto it. I filled the tank with conditioned water, threw a primed, battery-powered filter on the side. I then got the lamprey.

And stuck my arm into the tank.

Now, this made perfect sense to me at the time, and it frankly still does. Lamprey aren't scavengers; as adults, they preferentially feed on large fish, and will predate upon marine mammals if there are any in their range. We had no large fish to offer, and while lamprey raised in captivity can be trained to take dead fish, this was a wild-caught animal. Hence, my introducing a live target for the lamprey.

My plan was, that the lamprey would attach to my non-dominant arm, and with the aid of the stock cart, I would be able to wheel around my new closest friend. And as the lamprey adjusted to the new tank, it began what I now recognize are exploratory feeding behaviors in the Pacific lamprey; when allowed, they will swim near the target, and test out sites with their teeth before latching on, in a process that can take some time, if you don't move. I was fully prepared, and watching with a camera ready.

Unfortunately for me and the lamprey, however, my teacher decided that after 15 minutes, I had to go to my next class, and without the lamprey.

But yeah! That's my lamprey story, the time I almost succeeded feeding myself to one, when I was 14! My parents were... Well. My father just sighed when I told him. XD

(The lamprey did not end up showing interest in feeding on anything else, and was humanely euthanized later. Last I checked, it's a very nice specimen in her teaching collection.)