Officials celebrate the near-eradication of invasive creature in Great Lakes: 'This is an unprecedented victory'

Getting rid of an invasive species is not an easy feat — that's how they came to be called "invasive species" after all. In the Great Lakes, however, National Geographic reported officials are declaring victory over the invasive sea lamprey.

In order to combat the highly predatory sea lamprey, which arrived in the region more than a century ago and immediately began to gobble up native species, scientists developed a new type of lampricide that has now killed off between 90-95% of the sea lampreys in the Great Lakes without harming the native species.

"There is no doubt that this is an unprecedented victory anywhere on the planet, where you have a species this destructive, this widespread geographically, and yet still able to be controlled using a selective technique," said Great Lakes Fishery Commission's executive secretary Marc Gaden. "It saved the Great Lakes fishery."

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Other attempts to manage sea lamprey populations included releasing sterile males into their populations and setting up a kind of border crossing for them. Ultimately, though, it seems to have been the lampricide that did the trick.

The lampricide was developed by scientists at the University of Michigan along with officials at Hammond Bay Biological Station. It took seven years for them to stumble across a solution that worked.

"It's not rocket science to kill fish. Fishery managers actually do it all the time," Gaden explained. "What's really hard is killing just what you're after and leaving everything else intact."

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The sea lamprey's impact on this  ecosystem rivaled that of the most destructive, parasitic species of all time: humans.

"At their height, [sea lampreys] were consuming over 100 million pounds of fish," said Greg McClinchey, legislative affairs and policy director for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. "To put that into perspective, they were outcompeting humans for that resource. They were more damaging to the natural ecosystem than people, and that's pretty hard to do."

For many other invasive fish species, such as lionfish and snakeheads, officials hope to merely control the populations rather than eradicate them almost entirely — but perhaps the success of the lampricide program can offer some hope.

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