Upcoming Lamprey Talk

I will be giving a lamprey talk at the upcoming Coastal & Estuarine Research Federation (November 5-9), you can see more about the organization and meeting here. I will upload the talk and of course post a link on the blog. The talk will focus on modeling lamprey life history or, more simply, predicting what animals should do during the lives to maximize the number of offspring they can produce.

In the meantime have a look at this picture, which is the material found within the gut of an ammocoete:

The pink is a stain to help us visualize the material, but the brown is the natural color. Ammocoetes ingest a lot of organic muck (often called detritus) but are able to extract nutrition from this material. There are also numerous algal cells in the detritus, which are also probably important to ammocoetes. The chocolate chips in the cookie dough, so to speak.