Lampreys have a terrifying reputation: They guzzle the blood of their prey, earning them the nickname of “vampire fish.” An Australian man has long been looking for the once-abundant pouched lamprey, and at last, has had a sighting.
According to a report by The Sun, tour guide Sean Blocksidge has been searching for the elusive creature for 20 years. Spurred by local legends in Margaret River, Australia, of the eel-like creature migrating up local waterfalls — something that hasn’t been seen in 10 years — Blocksidge continued his relentless search, comparing it to looking for a “yeti or the Loch Ness monster.”
So when he spotted half-a-dozen pouched lamprey at one time, Blocksidge couldn’t believe his luck, The Sun reported.
“It was a kind of surreal moment. I had heard so many stories from the old-timers about how the lampreys used to migrate in their thousands up the waterfalls,” Blocksidge explained.
“But we haven’t seen them in our Margaret River system for well over a decade,” the Aussie said.
The 49-year-old spotted the rare lampreys at Yalgardup Falls, a location he and his tour groups routinely visit, the Sun said. At first, he mistook what looked like “a long blue tube” in the river’s shallows for a piece of rubbish. But since rubbish in the river is uncommon, he took a closer look, to discover “another half dozen of the ‘tubes’ trying to make their way up the waterfall.”
“It turned out it was the elusive pouched lamprey that I had been trying to find for the past 20 years!” Blocksidge told The Sun.
“Our river system has dried by over 20% in the past two decades and this is thought to be affecting their population,” Blocksidge told the Sun. He added, “Interestingly it was a very wet winter this year and the lampreys obviously knew it was a good year to migrate up the system again.”
The early life of the slippery pouched lampreys, which are widespread in the Southern Hemisphere, is spent in freshwater before it migrates downstream to the sea, where it feeds on other fish during its adult life. They are then said to return to rivers to breed and spawn before they die.
While Blocksidge welcomed the pouched lamprey sighting in Margaret River, Australia, a report by ABC News states that the invasion of the sea lamprey, a species native to the Northern Hemisphere, has been devastating to the lake trout population in the Great Lakes region of the U.S., causing it to plummet in the last century. A poison has been developed by researchers that’s applied to tributary rivers where the lamprey spawn, keeping them in check there.
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