The sea lamprey is a uniquely unloveable beast. It looks something like a 2-foot-long eel, but where the face would normally go the lamprey has only a gaping, sharp-toothed mouth. This mouth latches, leech-like, onto unsuspecting fish and slurps up their blood. The sight alone is queasy-making, write Marion Renault and Michael Tessler, but the sea lamprey is reviled for another reason: Its bloodthirsty appetite has caused ecological and economic havoc in the Great Lakes, where it is an invasive species, for more than a century. Across the pond, in its native habitat of Western Europe, however, sea lampreys have the opposite problem. Due to habitat loss and warmer temperatures, their numbers are dangerously falling. To solve both challenges, biologists are seeking to understand the lamprey's unique adaptive skills—including its powerful nose, its toothy suction, and its reproductive fecundity—to create fine-tuned biochemical and machine-learning tools that can manipulate the species' numbers. Increasingly, conservation and control are "two sides of the same coin," as Margaret Docker, a lamprey biologist at the University of Manitoba, puts it. The sea lamprey, like many animal species, can be villains and victims both—and it is up to humans to adjust how we see them. Camille Bromley | Features Editor |
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