Lampreys

A creepy, parasitic fish that thrives by sucking the blood out of its hosts – earning the nickname "vampire fish" – is making a comeback in the Great Lakes after the pandemic interrupted population control of the species.The fish, which has a circular row of teeth, a serrated tongue, and an eel-like shape, is called the sea lamprey.According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea lampreys are native to the northern and western Atlantic Ocean but invaded the Great Lakes around the early 19th century…

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.“Thousands of sea lamprey are passed upstream each year. This is a predator that wiped out the Great Lakes lake-trout fishery. literally suck the life out of their host fish, namely small-scale fish such as trout and salmon. The fish ladders ought to be used to diminish the lamprey.” So editorialized the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Massachusetts, on December 15, 2002.If that’s true, why this spring is Trout Unlimited—the…

TRANSCRIPT Kandace Griffin: It's like we're making coffee. You're passing a hot liquid over a solid and making lamprey coffee. We have a flask of solvent, and as that heats up, it's going to evaporate. And then we'll condense over the extractor body, which has our whole body sea lamprey, and then it will go back down onto the sea lamprey. That's how the alarm cue is extracted from the body. Griffin: We collect it, and then that's what we can use in our experiments. An alarm cue is a substance that warns other animals,…