Mon 20 Jul 2009 As far as scary-looking fish go, the adult sea
lamprey is right up there with the sharks. It’s about 3 feet
long, with concentric rings of teeth inside a jawless, suction-
cup mouth. After trapping its prey by sucking, the lamprey
scrapes off the skin using a tooth at the end of its tongue, and
then sucks out the blood. Since the lamprey has good taste in
fish – preferring trout, salmon, bass –it’s the target of a
federal lampricide program in the Great Lakes region, where it
has nearly devoured some of these stocks. But no creature is all
bad. “The lamprey has a really beautiful spinal cord,” says Ona
Bloom, an MBL Research Fellow from The Feinstein Institute for
Medical Research. Together with Jennifer Morgan (Univ. of Texas
at Austin) and David Parker (Univ. of Cambridge), who are
recipients of an MBL sponsored Albert and Ellen Grass Faculty
Research Grant, Bloom and her colleagues are studying the
lamprey’s remarkable ability to recover from severe spinal cord
injury. “We have been talking