Anatomically speaking they don't have a face like vertebrate fishes, so they suckers don't need to be concerned of saving their face about how they live
I've always heard of lampreys referred to as just "lampreys". Usually when you put a modifier in front of a name it's because you want to distinguish it from the normal, or most common, or the first-discovered thing. Saying "sea lamprey" implies that there are other kinds of lampreys that are not in the sea. I guess there could be fresh-water lampreys of course.
Beautiful: humans, flowers, orchids, bumble bees, butterflies, ladybirds, birds of paradise, big cats...
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!
>Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time.
To be clear, I think you're claiming:
1. beauty _is_ objective
2. this beauty-is-subjective thing is a recent phenomenon
I disagree with both of those claims, but the second one is more interesting to me. At least in the 1700's some people believed that beauty is subjective [1]. But perhaps you consider the 1700's recent?
TL/DR: where sea lampreys have been part of the ecosystem for a long time, they are a valuable part of that ecosystem. Where they are an invasive species, they disrupt ecosystems and can nearly wipe out fish species that haven't co-evolved with them - but that doesn't mean the goal should be to exterminate them everywhere.
Why would the years of life on earth (or evolution) matter for species alive today being of "ecological importance" or not?
Ecological importance is more about the role they play, and whether it's essential or inessential, and if the former if it can be easily substituted by another species or mechanism.
> Why would the years of life on earth (or evolution) matter for species alive today being of "ecological importance" or not?
It matters because we're not that smart. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons. Not just to the species itself, which you seem to discount despite their ancient pedigree, but even to us through second order effects.
The amount of time a species has been around is a strong clue that they're fulfilling a role in the ecosystem. Nature doesn't really do 'superfluous'; everything connects. Not in a hippy dippy way, but in the realest way, and in ways beyond our comprehension. The classic examples when I was growing up of 'nature being wasteful' - the appendix and 'junk DNA' - have now been revised... Because we learned more.
No one knew how wolves change rivers [0] until it was studied. In hindsight it's obvious and makes perfect sense, but we didn't deem wolves "essential" when we killed them all.
>It matters because we don't know so much. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons
Sure, but that's an argument for "evolution being so complex and long process, we don't know much about which species is essential or not".
Not for the original claim "After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?" which seems to imply that all/most specific are of ecological importance just because they're old, except maybe some more recent ones like primates.
The two claims are basically saying the same thing. You can't deny one and not the other.
Evolution has taken place over billions and billions of years in a system that's far beyond our comprehension in complexity.
Evolving - or even not evolving - in this system over billions of years and surviving implies importance. I can't say it guarantees that a species is "essential", but that was never the argument.
This implies that a certain ecological state is preferable to another one and maintaining this state requires some essential actor. This makes sense from an anthropocentric point of view but I doubt that evolutionary processes work that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOX7QQJyvjc
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