The sea lamprey is an aggressive predator by nature, which gives it a competitive advantage in a lake system where it has no predators and its prey lacks defenses against it. The sea lamprey played a large role in the destruction of the Lake Superior trout population.

Their success in the Great Lakes can be attributed to hundreds of stream miles of excellent spawning and larval habitat, the abundance of host fishes at the time of invasion and a lack of natural predators. Additionally, female sea lamprey are highly fecund, or capable of producing an abundance of offspring, and can produce up to 100,000 eggs ...

2024年6月16日 · They never could have known that they were providing passage to a voracious Atlantic predator—the sea lamprey—which, by the 1930s, would destroy the Great Lakes' 10-million-pounds-per-year trout fishery and decimate other commercially valuable species.

As with many invasive species, the sea lamprey entered the Great Lakes and found no natural predators, competitors, parasites or pathogens — no natural population controls. The top predators of the existing food web, like lake trout, were …

In the Great Lakes, where no such co-evolutionary link exists, sea lampreys act as predators, with each individual capable of killing up to 40 pounds (more than 20 kilograms) of fish over their 12-18 month feeding period.

2020年4月9日 · An introduced predator, the European catfish (Silurus glanis), is now widespread in Western and Southern European freshwaters, adding a new threat for sea lamprey migrating into...

2025年1月8日 · Starting in the 1830s, the sea lamprey began to appear in the Great Lakes. Over the next 100 years it spread throughout the ecosystem, where it has no natural predators, and has inflicted considerable damage to native fish populations (see also invasive species).

2020年9月28日 · Sea lampreys are predators, attaching to fish and feeding on their blood and body fluids. Adams' study and its surprising findings were recently published online in the peer-reviewed...

Sea lamprey predation, in combination with other factors (i.e., overfishing and hybridization with more common cisco species), led to the extinction of three endemics in the Great Lakes; the longjaw cisco Coregonus alpenae, the deepwater cisco C. johannae, and the blackfin cisco C. nigripinnis (Miller et al. 1989).

2020年3月3日 · Lake trout, historically one of the main predatory fish species in the Great Lakes, were especially hard hit by the exploding sea lamprey population. Combined with overfishing by humans, the lake trout population declined, and the natural balance of …