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- Jun 22, 2020
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Sean Campbell was out fishing on Lake Superior when one of the charter captain’s clients reeled in a beautiful 32½-inch lake trout with something strange attached to its forehead.
“It looked like a horn on a unicorn,” said Campbell, owner of Northern Lights Adventures with his wife, Savanna. “It was just flapping around.”
That’s when he realized the fish had fallen victim to a sea lamprey—the scariest creature in the Great Lakes. The invasive, eel-like parasite has a round mouth filled with concentric rows of tiny teeth that could creep out a dentist. The varmint attaches to trout, salmon and other sport fish and slowly drains them of vital fluids. When the client’s bizarre catch hit the deck on the Campbells’ boat, the 10-inch lamprey released its hold and tried to get away, creating panic on the vessel.
The creatures have remained largely unchanged for more than 340 million years. They wriggled into Lake Erie some 100 years ago via the Welland Canal, which bypasses the natural barrier of Niagara Falls. Native to the Atlantic Ocean, they are also found in the Baltic, Adriatic and Mediterranean seas.
In the ocean, they tend to attach to bigger fish and are more parasites than killers.
In the Great Lakes, they have no natural predators and usually kill the fish they attach to. By the middle of the last century, sea lampreys, which eat up to 40 pounds of fish in their lifetime and whose females lay up to 100,000 eggs, were devastating local fish across the Great Lakes.
A Vampire Creature in the Great Lakes Is Scaring Fishermen and Tourists—‘Like Science Fiction’
The bloodsucking fish, with creepy teeth, make a comeback. ‘People just freak.’
www.wsj.com
