The Double Life of an American Lake Monster - In the Great Lakes, sea lampreys are a scourge. In Europe, they’re an endangered cultural treasure. Can biologists suppress—and save—the species?
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AS THE SUN tucked itself beneath the horizon, all was still on Michigan’s White River. Kandace Griffin, a fisheries and wildlife doctoral student at Michigan State University, sat on her gently bobbing research boat, listening to the evening chorus of frog croaks and red-winged blackbird songs. Every so often, a series of sharp taps emitted from a small speaker broke through the natural sounds, signaling that a sea lamprey—part of an experimental group she’d tagged earlier—was weaving through the depths below.
Griffin is part of a decades-long effort between the US and Canadian governments, researchers, and fisheries to control populations of the sea lamprey, an invasive species in the Great Lakes region. While the Great Lakes are home to four species of native lamprey, the sea lamprey slithered in from the Atlantic Ocean more than a hundred years ago, and promptly began annihilating native fish populations.
Earlier that morning, at a Great Lakes Fishery Commission lab, Griffin had pulled nine sea lampreys from a large aquarium where, suckered onto the tank walls, they unknowingly awaited surgery. The lampreys took some expertise to handle—once out of the water, they lashed chaotically until anesthetic relaxed them into “wet noodles”—but Griffin had practiced her operations on more docile subjects first. “I did a lot of banana surgeries,” she said with a smile, as she masterfully implanted the sea lampreys with Tic Tac-sized acoustic telemetry trackers and quickly closed up the sutures.
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https://www.wired.com/story/the-doub...-sea-lampreys/