MSU researchers may have found a way to control the number of fish killed by parasitic sea lamprey.
Weiming Li, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife, has been working on isolating the pheromones of sea lamprey. Pheromones are chemicals produced by animals that serve as a stimulus to attract other members of the same species.
Sea lamprey are native to regions of the Atlantic Ocean. They can attach themselves to fish, feed on them and eventually kill them. Lamprey can kill more than 40 pounds of fish in their lifetime, causing danger for Great Lakes fish.
Li’s research has concluded that mature male sea lamprey release an acid that can act as a potent sex pheromone, stimulating interest from ovulating female lamprey.
“We would like to find an alternative way to control the sea lamprey and we are hoping this alternative method will be more environmentally kind and also will be a lot cheaper,” Li said. “Pheromones, if we can develop it, would have all those features. That’s why we concentrated our research on pheromones.”
He said the same approach of studying pheromones developed in this research can be applied in other research and management of other fish species.
Research was funded with a $600,000 grant by the combined efforts of the International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
“They have both done a lot,” said Roger Eberhardt, environmental quality specialist at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “The (fishery commission) was set up in part to control sea lamprey, and has been very active for decades controlling them. The results of their integrative pest management have been excellent.
Fishery commission officials said that invasion of sea lamprey has caused many problems for much of the past century.
“The sea lamprey control problem has been with us since the 1920s, when they began invading the upper Great Lakes,” Marc Gaden, spokesman for the fishery commission, said.
“(The old lamprey control chemical) is very useful, and has been the mainstay in the program, but it’s very expensive,” Gaden said. “(The fishery commission) wants a more integrative program that attacks sea lamprey from all different angles, to prevent infestation. We’ve been using different methods. We don’t want to keep all of our eggs in one basket.”
The new efforts to prevent sea lamprey infestation in the Great Lakes have not been lauded as revolutionary, although they are key to the future of their control.
“The future (of sea lamprey control) lies in pheromones,” Gaden said. “If we can somehow trick them into mating behavior and then somehow use that against them, we could use that as a lamprey control without using lamprecides. We want to use it on a large scale. The potential is enormous.”
