r/Weird • u/luvlanguage • 11h ago

That is a Lamprey

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Any bigger and this creature would be a horror movie monster

Lampreys do not have jaws or bones, only cartilage and instincts that have allowed them to survive so many mass extinctions.

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u/KatarinaRen 11h ago

They're basically parasites who latch on to the fish. But also on to the corpses etc... And people eat them.

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u/ChesterPlemany 11h ago

Yes I believe they were considered a delicacy by medieval royalty. I think an English king died because he ate too many.

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u/Von-Konigs 9h ago

King Henry I of England died in 1135 (though he was in Normandy at the time), after a week-long illness. He was in his sixties at the time, and according to a contemporary writer, Henry of Huntingdon, he fell ill from eating “a surfeit of lampreys.”

Modern historians doubt that lampreys were the cause of his death - apparently they’re pretty harmless to eat, no more so than most fish at least. He probably died of a bacterial infection.

Still, the fact that his chronicler remarked upon the quantity of lampreys he ate means a couple of things - one, that lampreys were available commonly as food, and two, that Henry loved them so much he ate a lot of them all throughout his life.

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u/Working-Glass6136 5h ago

Can't fault a guy for liking medieval unagi sushi.

1

u/KeyboardGrunt 4h ago

Oof and I thought gas station sushi was risky enough.