Peter Sorensen Quotations

Removing one female lamprey isn't always a terribly valuable exercise. But to prevent a group from spawning, there is enormous payoff there.

After 16 years, we're there. We've isolated it, and we can synthesize it.

The key here is the fact that this pheromone is natural, safe, and should be very inexpensive to add,

to mate with females who would waste their reproductive potential.

The GLFC has the goal of controlling lamprey with a new and better technique by 2010. This could be it. Also, lamprey are important to native peoples on the West Coast, who value it for food. This pheromone could help restore lamprey runs by attracting lamprey to suitable spawning beds.

Using these extracts has been shown to work,

If they can capture them very efficiently in that time, that's a great way to do it. Up to this point, it hasn't been very efficient. Now maybe we can bring them into traps for extended periods.

And this led to an observation decades ago -- which was key -- that adult lamprey must be selective in how they pick streams, ... They only pick a few, and if you remove the larvae they don't seem to go in there.

This presents the possibility of a whole new environmentally safe tool for controlling sea lamprey in the Great Lakes.