Of all the fishy predators in the Great Lakes, few are more destructive than the sea lamprey. There’s something of a horror movie in their approach: jawless, they attach to prey such as salmon, whitefish or trout with a sucker mouth and drain the victim of its blood and lymph.
For years, scientists and policy-makers have been trying to devise strategies to curb this population, which first arrived from Europe through shipping channels in the early 20th century.
Now, in a collaborative project with Istvan Imre of Algoma University and Nicholas Johnson of the United States Geological Survey, Concordia biology professor Grant Brown has developed a promising — and natural — solution. Their findings, which focus on the species’ own alarm cues, were recently published in Fisheries Management and Ecology.
Environmental and financial impacts
“Lamprey cause estimates of millions of dollars of damage in lost commercial and recreational fisheries,” says Brown, whose work in the Faculty of Arts and Science focuses on aquatic behavioural and chemical ecology.
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