Sea Lamprey are Wanderers
Ann Arbor, MI — There are a lot of lamprey in Lake Champlain, and they're restless.
Sea lamprey are the scourge of the Great Lakes salmonid fishery; to feed, they rasp holes in the flesh of lake trout and salmon and suck out body fluids. To control this pest, state and federal agencies apply a lamprey-specific poison to streams where juvenile lampreys live.
"To control lamprey more effectively, it's important to know where the parasites in the lakes come from," says Ellen Marsden, a professor at the University of Vermont. "In Lake Champlain, we have several discrete basins, separated by man-made causeways. If lamprey spawn and live in only one basin, then we don't need to control lamprey in basins where there are few salmon and trout."
Researchers tagged over four thousand juvenile lamprey while they were still resident in streams, then captured parasitic lamprey in Lake Champlain a year later and examined them for tags. They discovered that lamprey are not confined to the basin in which they were born, but move freely and frequently through the causeways.
The study also revealed that Lake Champlain has an astonishing number of lamprey; equivalent, in terms of relative lake area, to 15 times the number of lamprey in Lake Huron. Eric Howe, a recent graduate of the University of Vermont and lead investigator on the study, notes, "It's not suprising, with this many lamprey in the lake, that we are seeing very high wounding rates on lake trout, much higher than in the Great Lakes."
Original Publication Information
Results of this study "Movement of Sea Lamprey in the Lake Champlain Basin," are reported by Eric A. Howe, J. Ellen Marsden and Wayne Bouffard in the latest issue (Volume 32, No. 4, pp. 776-787) of the Journal of Great Lakes Research, published by the International Association for Great Lakes Research, 2006.
Contacts
For more information about the study, contact Ellen Marsden, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405; ellen.marsden@uvm.edu; (802) 656-0715.
For information about the Journal of Great Lakes Research, contact Marlene Evans, Editor, National Water Research Institute, 11 Innovation Boulevard, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 3H5, Canada; editor@iaglr.org; (608) 692-1076.
Links
Since 1967, IAGLR has served as the focal point for compiling and disseminating multidisciplinary knowledge on North America's Laurentian Great Lakes and other large lakes of the world and their watersheds. In part, IAGLR communicates this knowledge through publication of the Journal of Great Lakes Research, available to members in print and electronic form. A searchable archive of the journal is available online and includes the abstracts of articles from the journal's inception in 1975 through the most recent issue. In addition, complete articles are available to members who have signed up for an electronic subscription.