The sea lamprey, a parasitic fish native to the northern and western Atlantic Ocean, made its way into the Great Lakes in the 1830s. There, it has laid waste to populations of lake trout and other bony fish, effectively single-handedly killing the region's trout fisheries. The National Ocean Service has called it "America's first destructive invasive species."
Now, scientists have proposed a new method of controlling sea lamprey populations: releasing sterile males into lamprey populations. After a decade-long study, scientists from the Great Lakes Science Center and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have published their results in the journal Nature.
"Here, we demonstrate for the first time in fish, that a small population of sea lamprey … arguably one of the most impactful invasive fish in the world, can be controlled by the release of sterilized males," the scientists wrote.
A similar method was deployed to help control mosquito populations in Brazil and Djibouti. In that case, the mosquitoes released were genetically modified to kill female mosquitoes after mating with them.
Genetic modification has also been proposed as a strategy for dealing with invasive plant species. While this type of method may sound extreme on the surface, the big advantage is that it does not involve the use of pesticides or herbicides — or, at least, requires less of them to be used — saving the environment from toxic chemicals that harm all life indiscriminately and have several long-term downsides.
In the case of the sea lampreys, releasing large numbers of sterile males into geographically isolated populations was enough to significantly reduce their numbers when combined with lampricide treatment, the scientists reported.
"The postponement of lampricide treatments in the Pigeon, Sturgeon, and Maple Rivers had the added benefits of allowing resources to be diverted to control sea lamprey in other priority areas in the Great Lakes, thereby collectively benefiting the entire program," the scientists wrote.
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