Prehistoric ‘vegan Dracula’ found in Qld
Scientists have recently found eel-like creatures with seven gills in Queensland that are even more prehistoric than the Australian lungfish. Watch the video.
When Dr Luke Carpenter-Bundhoo first discovered Australian brook Lampreys on K’Gari back in 2022, his first thought was, ‘What are they doing here?’
“They’re even more of a dinosaur fish than our Australian lungfish,” Carpenter-Bundhoo said.
“Technically, Queensland is home to the world’s first tropical lamprey.”
The Australian brook Lamprey earned the nickname of ‘vegan Dracula’ from its non-parasitic status, despite its distinctive, circular rows of sharp teeth.
It was thought Lampreys couldn’t exist in warmer waters, but now they’ve been found in K’Gari and as far north as Rockhampton for more than a decade.
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“Nobody knew they were on the island, which wasn’t surprising either – this particular species of lamprey was 1,400km north of its previously documented location in streams near the border of New South Wales and Victoria,” Griffith University aquatic ecologist Dr Luke Carpenter-Bundhoo said.
The team was awarded $90,116 under the Protecting Queensland’s Threatened Species Applied Research Grant Program, delivered by the Queensland Government’s Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation (DETSI).
Working alongside DETSI Principal Scientist David Moffat, the two scientists were electrofishing one of the island’s many creeks while studying the impacts of the Black Summer bushfires on K’Gari in 2022 when they came across the ancient species.
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He said that Lampreys haven’t changed in about 150 million years – the Lampreys we see today are pretty much the same as back then.
Now the two scientists are working together to better understand one of Queensland’s newest and least-known threatened fish, the Australian brook Lamprey.
Not much is known about them aside from their lifespans and growth progression, but the Australian brook Lamprey’s ancient but relatively simple biology and physiology have made them an ideal ‘model species’ for further scientific research into understanding human health and diseases.
Carpenter-Bundhoo said that researching them can help us understand more complex organisms, like humans.
“Studying lamprey DNA is a bit like looking back at an earlier edition of the vertebrate instruction manual, before hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering,” Dr Carpenter-Bundhoo said.
There are around 50 Lamprey species in the world, with Australia home to three, of which the Australian brook Lamprey is one of the smallest at 15cm.
Carpenter-Bundhoo and Moffat will return to K’Gari and other Queensland sites with a team to continue to find and study the Australian brook Lamprey and the two other yet-to-be-named species.
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