2 Million Sea Lampreys Invaded the Great Lakes: The 67-Year Battle to Eradicate Them скачать в хорошем качестве

2 Million Sea Lampreys Invaded the Great Lakes: The 67-Year Battle to Eradicate Them

The Great Lakes had a cold-water empire hiding in plain sight. Did you know? For generations, lake trout and whitefish fed Indigenous nations, powered dockside towns, and filled markets from Duluth to Detroit, with catches that could reach tens of millions of pounds a year. Then one engineering shortcut changed everything, canals meant for trade quietly opened a path around Niagara Falls, and an Atlantic parasite slipped in. By the mid-1900s, sea lampreys were tearing through the lakes, leaving fish survival at just one in seven, and collapsing a fishery that entire communities were built on. What followed wasn’t a single fix, it was decades of cross-border science, barriers, and carefully timed chemical treatments, repeated year after year, just to keep one invader from taking over again. Even today, the Great Lakes live under a kind of uneasy truce, stability bought with constant vigilance, and hard choices about what gets harmed to save what remains. This is the story of how an invasion started fast, and why controlling it has become a forever job.