After I heard about the Eurofishion competition set up to mark World Fish Migration day in October this year, I decided to have a go at entering it. Eventually inspiration came from my time working on the Ensembl Genome Browser – the version at the time annotated each species with some text to denote the sound each creature made, and one of my colleagues was excited by the ‘Rasp!, Rasp!’ sound effect attributed to it in the browser. There is also some really interesting genomic behaviour this creature exhibits – more on that down below.

Before you read about it why not pop over to the Eurofishion site, check the song out, and hopefully give it a positive vote! (Votes now closed) There are some really amazing videos there from other participants so have a browse of those as well.

The lamprey, sometimes known as the vampire fish, is famous for sticking themselves to the side to, and sucking the blood of trouts. They are also really interesting genomically as they have all sorts of weirdness going on – high GC content, repeats, and the Northern lampreys have the highest number of chromosomes (164–174) among vertebrates. Most unusual of all they re-arrange their genomes in development!

Music & Lyrics by Rishi Nag 2020

Video Credits: Camera, editing and recording Rishi Nag

Animation by Miss Roberts

Stills: courtesy of Tiit Hunt,  Drow male,  and Sweeting, Roger [Photographer] (2016) Freshwater Biological Association, UK for Sea lamprey parasitising brown trout under CC BY-SA 3.0