London: Scientists have said that a synthetic “chemical sex smell” could help rid North America’s Great Lakes of the sea lamprey, a devastating pest, dubbed as the “vampire fish”.
The sea lamprey has parasitised native species of the Great Lakes since its accidental introduction in the 1800s.
The sea lamprey’s natural life cycle takes it from birth in a stream to adulthood in the ocean, where it gains its vampirical appellation.
Circular jaws lock on to another, larger fish, and a sharp tongue carves through its scales.
From then on, the lamprey feeds on the blood and body fluids of its temporary host, often killing it in the process.
The Great Lakes on the US-Canada border support recreational fishing worth billions of dollars a year, which the lampreys would wreck but for a control programme costing about 20 million dollars annually.
Now, according to a report by BBC News, US researchers have deployed a laboratory version of a male sea lamprey pheromone to trick ovulating females into swimming upstream into traps.
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