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  1. April 11, 2022

Amidst the growing thirst for captivating or sensationalist narratives, several true crime and history podcasts have been accused of plagiarizing written articles without credit over the past few years. Koerner has had this happen to him several times. “If something’s easy or free to access, there’s maybe a general assumption that it’s free to use,” he says. “There are a lot of people who’ve had their hard work repackaged for profit, and I fear it’s ultimately going to be a net negative for the whole ecosystem of people who create and tell stories.”

Plagiarism, it should be noted, is perfectly legal in the United States, provided it doesn’t cross the (often nebulous) definition of intellectual property theft. Movies, music, or works of fiction have robust legal protections against this (recall the zillions of lawsuits between artists for stealing each other’s samples), and Koerner’s Atlantic story is protected under the law as well (in works where the originality or artistry of the author is sufficiently evident, courts will side with the creator), but it often isn’t worth the time and money to pursue legal action.

Yet the definitions of what constitutes IP get murky quickly. You can’t copyright a dance or a recipe or a yoga pose, for instance, and it’s really hard to copyright a joke. You also, for obvious reasons, can’t copyright a fact, which means that in industries where IP law can only do so much, social and professional norms dictate your reputation: journalism, comedy, and academia, for instance, fields in which plagiarism is the among the most cardinal of sins.

So what of the average influencer, YouTuber, or podcaster? Internet posts are, for the most part, not copyrightable intellectual property. Instead, they’re more like a hybrid of journalism and comedy, meaning that social media typically must police itself against thieves.

Meme theft has been the subject of debate for as long as they’ve been around; back in 2015, popular Instagram meme pages like @TheFatJewish and @FuckJerry faced a reckoning over joke stealing, largely from comedians but also from random people who’d made viral tweets and later saw them reposted elsewhere. Fast forward seven years, and the problem hasn’t gone away — in fact, it’s gotten worse. The meme pages, or accounts that curate mostly other people’s content, won. Some have even successfully argued that what they do is an art form in itself.

Jonathan Bailey became interested in the subject of plagiarism in the early 2000s, when he ran a goth literary blog devoted to his poetry and fiction. After a reader pointed him to another blog that was stealing his work, he did some digging and found hundreds of others in the online goth community republishing his writing as their own. “I actually won a crap ton of contests on AllPoetry.com despite never having an account there,” he says. For the past decade, he’s been focused on his blog Plagiarism Today, which tracks current events relating to the subject and advice for what to do if you’ve been plagiarized.

He posits that there are three main eras of internet plagiarism. The first was in the ’90s and early 2000s, when people stole each other’s work because they wanted to pass it off on their own, but didn’t necessarily have a profit motive. The second was in the mid-2000s, when search engine optimization became a widespread practice and sites could make money from crappy, AI-written work that capitalized on the strategic placement of certain keywords. “That came to a halt when Google really started clamping down on low-quality content,” Bailey explains. The third era is made up of the kind that flourishes on social media, where users compete for the most attention-grabbing content in the hopes they might make ad revenue or score a brand deal.

“[Social media] puts a lot of pressure on what is fundamentally a creative process,” he says. “I’ve talked to repeated plagiarists who say ‘I felt pressure to put up this many articles or podcasts or videos.”

It’s easy to argue that social media platforms practically beg their users to plagiarize each other. “The way that YouTube works is that [people] create trends, and those trends are meant to be followed by everyone else,” explains Faithe Day, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies Research who works with students on data science and digital platform ethics. “But there’s a fine line between following a trend and copying what someone else is doing and saying it’s your own.”

Determining who copied who is a convoluted and often unsolvable problem, particularly when people exist in such varied digital spaces. “A lot of people who plagiarize don’t know that they’re plagiarizing. They don’t know that the thing they’re talking about someone else has already discovered,” Day says.

It’s difficult to name a platform where plagiarism is more pronounced than TikTok, whose technology encourages people to react and build off each other’s work, often with little or no acknowledgment of the original creator. It’s become such an issue that last week TikTok announced a new feature that allows its users to credit an existing video when posting their own. “These features are an important step in our ongoing commitment to investing in resources and product experiences that support a culture of credit, which is central to ensuring TikTok remains a home for creative expression,” wrote Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s director of creator community, in the announcement.

TikTok
TikTok’s new crediting feature.

Day sees this most often in instances where popular TikTok creators hop on a trending dance or audio without knowing who the original creator is, thus spreading it to more people for whom the popular creator was the de facto origin. Nowhere was this more clear than in late 2019 and early 2020 when the Renegade dance took over TikTok, despite its choreographer, a 14-year-old in Atlanta named Jalaiah Harmon, receiving none of the credit or clout until months later.

The instance sparked a reckoning on the platform, culminating in a Black creator strike to protest rampant co-opting of the community’s dances and slang. “Recommendation algorithms are engineered to ensure that people who have large followings are being recommended to other users, so there aren’t a lot of possibilities for smaller creators to get recognition,” Day explains.

There has never been quite so much to gain, potentially, by being widely credited as a true originator of a viral moment. Coin a term? Sell it as an NFT. Appeared on a reality show? Launch an OnlyFans. Get a ton of followers for whatever reason? Put your Venmo handle in your bio. Shill for a shady galaxy lights brand or sign with an agent who specializes in squeezing cash out of small bursts of attention.

In a climate like this, people have understandably grown quite protective over their ideas, sometimes to the point of being obnoxious (a fellow journalist recalls a time when a TikToker was angry that she had offhandedly linked to one of their videos without mentioning them by name). There are incentives to passing other people’s work off as your own — incentives, even, to avoid researching whether anyone has done the work before.

“Everybody’s looking for a side hustle, and an easy way to make money is aggregating content,” says Chris Stokel-Walker, a UK-based journalist who’s experienced several of the kind of muddy is-is-actually-plagiarism moments where you end up feeling used and exploited but unsure of whether it’s worth starting trouble. “It does hurt, in a way. It’s like, well why did I spend months researching a story or a book only for someone to saunter along, cherry-pick the best bits, present it in a different format, and claim all the credit? What’s the point?”

While the technology to detect it has improved, it’s far more difficult to weed out plagiarism when it happens in different forms of media: written work that’s turned into a video, a podcast that’s turned into a book. Rather than relying on data systems to tell us when something is stolen, then, plagiarism experts acknowledge that the shift about proper idea attribution needs to happen culturally. “We have to answer that question as a collective society,” Bailey says.

“We need greater understanding about media literacy and internet ethics,” Day says. “It’s about doing the extra legwork, doing a Google search before you reproduce something. But people don’t do that extra work because there’s an assumption that what they’re seeing is a direct reflection of reality, which of course is not always true.”

They also might not be doing it because they have a monetary incentive to remain ignorant. But that’s a more complicated problem, one that can’t be solved with a platform tweak or new crediting system. It has to be widely understood that plagiarism is, for lack of a clearer term, loser behavior. And that begins with all of us.

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

Is it still ethical to collect butterflies for science?

Part of the May 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

The butterfly’s wings are splayed at an unnatural angle, orange-and-black markings visible to full effect. A metal pin skewers it to the wall. Through thick display glass, I read the tiny, hand-drawn label affixed to the pin’s base. This monarch, I learn, was collected from Michoud, Louisiana, in 1938.

Specimens like this one, housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, represent priceless bits of scientific data. Studying them has revealed everything from changes in butterfly wing shape over time to the genetics of extinct species to new species altogether. They are also now the subject of a passionate debate.

For centuries, butterfly collectors — also known as lepidopterists — have pursued their quarries with a standard set of equipment: vials of alcohol, cyanide bricks, metal pins, jars, and the iconic butterfly net. These insect enthusiasts meticulously catalog each butterfly specimen in the name of science (and, occasionally, fun). Their pinned prizes make up the bulk of museum butterfly collections to this day.

As a former entomology student, I am intimately familiar with catching butterflies. I have maintained my own collection for nearly a decade, donating extra specimens to local science museums. But despite years of experience, the metal pins and poison jars have always made me slightly queasy. Turns out, I’m not alone.

The last 30 years have seen the rise of butterflying, a spiritual sibling to bird watching that involves identifying and photographing the insects rather than capturing them. Some of its staunchly anti-net advocates liken capturing, killing, and pinning butterflies to trophy hunting, and accuse collectors of accelerating environmental collapse.

“I’m not saying that we want to throw away the collections that are there,” says Jeffrey Glassberg, founder of the North American Butterfly Association. “But randomly collecting butterflies in the United States is nothing but self-serving nonsense.”

Some recent studies estimate that since the 1970s, a large portion of insect populations around the globe have declined by approximately 45 percent. Many refer to this as the “insect apocalypse.” In the modern era of climate change and biodiversity loss, some entomologists and butterflyers wonder, is it ethical to collect insect specimens at all? The debate has split scientists and hobbyists alike, driving a wedge between conservation groups, research labs, museum curators — and even lifelong friends.

Approximately 750 butterfly species live in North America, 22 of which are currently listed as endangered or threatened; dozens more hover in the slightly more nebulous “at risk” category. Five species have gone extinct in the US since 1950. It would be a stretch, most experts agree, to put much of the blame on insect collectors. But for a few cases, the practice can tip an already precarious population into free fall.

In the United States, recreational, permit-free collecting is allowed pretty much everywhere: in national forests, in national parks, and on private land.

But collecting for scientific purposes is strictly regulated. And those regulations vary widely from state to state. For instance, permits are required in Oklahoma state parks, but Michigan state parks have no such restrictions. California has perhaps the most confusing collection laws.

“Insects were not included as wildlife in the original drafting of the laws,” says Chris Grinter, the entomology collection manager at the California Academy of Sciences. “They were shoehorned into a revision.” By this strange twist, California insects are technically categorized as fish.

In addition, the line between recreational and scientific collecting is often blurry. “A lot of global experts are amateurs that just don’t have a full-time job as an entomologist,” says Grinter.

Museum collections often rely on specimens donated by amateur (and sometimes famous) lepidopterists, like author Vladimir Nabokov, whose butterflies make up a chunk of the American Museum of Natural History’s 3.5 million butterfly and moth specimens. And it’s not uncommon for non-experts to stumble across specimens new to science. (In 2018, the Florida Museum of Natural History used new gene sequencing technology on an old pinned butterfly. To their surprise, they identified it as a new species — some 60 years after it was collected by a local teen.)

Amateur collecting is not without its downsides, however. Under certain circumstances, it can pose real risks to rare species.

Mitchell’s satyrs are small and brown — not the most visually stunning butterflies on Earth. But for avid insect collectors in the 1970s and 80s, they might as well have been gold-plated.

Mitchell’s satyrs have always been rare and, therefore, desirable. They were once found in pockets throughout the US Midwest and Northeast in wet forest clearings known as fens. But in the mid-1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service noticed that the butterflies’ numbers had declined in several locations. The agency launched a years-long investigation to uncover the cause.

As an intern at the Sarett Nature Center in southwest Michigan, Nate Fuller says he witnessed these efforts. “There was an undercover Fish and Wildlife Service guy who would walk around the trails, keeping an eye out for anyone who looked suspiciously like they might be trying to steal a butterfly,” he recalls.

The agency ultimately found that habitat loss was the primary danger to Mitchell’s satyrs. But the agency also discovered that entire populations — including the only two in New Jersey — were potentially being wiped out by private collectors for whom the butterfly was a crown jewel. Today, Mitchell’s satyrs are confirmed in just 15 locations in Michigan, Indiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (and haven’t been seen in New Jersey since 1998). The butterflies were officially added to the Endangered Species List in 1992, making them illegal to collect. But some officials still worry about naive — or unscrupulous — collectors low-key swiping specimens.

a real butterfly collection, with rows of different butterflies of various shapes and sizes, pinned and framed. Courtesy of Joanna Thompson
The author’s personal butterfly collection.

“We’re intentionally vague about Mitchell’s satyr locations,” says Fuller, who is now the executive director at Sarett. And his park limits other potentially damaging activities, like hiking through fens. Mitchell’s satyrs are extremely delicate, and they make their chrysalises close to the ground, where a lumbering human foot is more than enough to crush them. Fuller says that occasionally, overly enthusiastic butterflyers stray from the center’s established trails in an effort to catch a glimpse of the rare insect and wind up doing unintentional harm.

“These little suckers are tough to keep alive,” he says.

As an undergraduate entomology student in the 2010s, I was routinely turned loose on North Carolina State University’s campus with specimen jars, a gauzy net, and instructions to swoop up every interesting bug I encountered. As a result, I learned the ins and outs of butterfly death.

I know how long to leave a specimen in the freezer to ensure its organs stop working, and how to activate the miniature brick of potassium cyanide fixed to the bottom of a killing jar. I know how to construct a label: location first, then species, date, and name. I know the slight give of an insect’s thorax as the metal pin slides through.

But the practice quietly unsettled me. There was, for example, the time I convinced myself I’d accidentally caught a rare species. Leaning over an impaled specimen, I flipped through my Butterflies of North Carolina and froze as I read the description: St. Francis’ satyr, endangered, a subspecies of the critically endangered Mitchell’s satyr.

Thankfully, I was mistaken. St. Francis’ satyrs are only found at Fort Bragg, 75 miles away. The butterfly was in fact a common Carolina satyr, a totally different species.

But what if I had caught a St. Francis’ satyr? Was my silly little collection worth that?

Amanda Northrop/Vox

Jeffrey Glassberg grew up on Long Island in the 1950s, chasing butterflies through the neighborhood with friends. He assumed he had outgrown his butterfly days when he enrolled in the civil engineering program at Tufts University. But although he would go on to earn two additional degrees in molecular genetics and law, he kept coming back to butterflies.

Glassberg founded the North American Butterfly Association, or NABA, in 1992 — the same year the Mitchell’s satyr was declared endangered — on the principle that people don’t need to catch butterflies in order to enjoy them. It’s also the driving message behind his first guidebook, Butterflies Through Binoculars, which shows readers how to identify butterflies by sight, much like a bird guide.

Straightaway, the organization and the book drew backlash; Glassberg says he received everything from tongue-lashings to death threats. How, critics exclaimed, could anyone study butterflies without collecting them?

Glassberg says that butterfly collection proponents point to the historical precedent of people like John J. Audubon, the famous wildlife illustrator and ornithologist, who shot birds in the early 1800s in order to study them in close detail. But that was an era before binoculars and high-resolution photography; today, anyone can become a birder with a guidebook and a decent pair of binoculars. “In my mind, that argument is truly stupid,” he says.

His message resonated with thousands of butterfly enthusiasts. Since the early 1990s, NABA has opened 23 chapters in 16 states. Today, the organization boasts over 4,500 members and its own kill-free, net-free nature sanctuary: the National Butterfly Center.

Opened in 2004, the National Butterfly Center occupies the site of an abandoned onion field in Mission, Texas, along the US-Mexico border. Its gardens burst with native plants teeming with butterflies and other pollinators, which cannot be collected on the premises. Their soothing insect hum is punctuated occasionally by the overhead chop of a border patrol helicopter.

When I arrived at the Center’s Texas Butterfly Festival in early November 2021, most of the 60-odd festival-goers had a pair of binoculars slung around their necks and a hefty-looking camera bag.

A butterfly lands on a plant. Courtesy of Joanna Thompson

A blue metalmark butterfly during the butterfly festival at the World Birding Center in Mission, Texas.

Our guide, Linda Cooper, showed us how to focus our cameras (or phones) at just the right depth for a perfect picture, how to find the flowers most likely to attract butterflies, and how to identify each species.

Slowly, I become more attuned to the creatures — because observation is the point.

Butterflying evokes the same breathless wonder that quickens my pulse every time I glimpse movement in the brush. But rather than strike with a net, I looked — really looked — at each insect, trying to spot the watermark that tells a queen from a soldier, or the Y-shaped pattern that sets a Turk’s cap skipper apart from a Laviana. It felt good to be filling my library with pictures rather than filling a box with bodies.

But even as I lost myself in the thrill, reminders of human threats, including climate change, were inescapable. Some host plants, including pipe vine, had been killed off by February’s extreme cold snap, which had left much of Texas without power. As a result, Cooper said, we were a lot less likely to encounter pipevine swallowtails, which are usually abundant.

In the foreground a person in a sun protection hat holds up a camera with a zoom lens pointed at a bush. In the background a person looks through a pair of binoculars. Courtesy of the National Butterfly Center
Butterfly hunters catch their quarry with cameras and binoculars during the Texas Butterfly Festival in November, 2021.

And on the horizon, the half-built border wall loomed. If completed, the concrete-and-rebar barrier will cut directly through the center’s gardens and could spell ecological disaster for many of its 300-plus butterfly species — including some found nowhere else on Earth — as well as the annual monarch migration.

Many butterfly specialists don’t oppose collecting butterflies in a strictly scientific capacity. And those folks include a close childhood friend of Jeff Glassberg, who grew up chasing bugs with him.

Robert Robbins is now the curator of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and, like Glassberg, he took an unconventional path to butterflies. He has never taken an etymology course in his life (he majored in math). But a chance encounter after graduate school with Glassberg got him interested in insects again — though, in time, the two would find themselves taking different stances.

“We don’t disagree on the facts,” says Robbins. “We just sort of have a different take on it.”

In only studying photographs, Robbins says, entomologists miss out on valuable sensory details. He points to his own research with hairstreak butterflies, in which males have a scent-producing organ on the upper side of their wings. Different hairstreak species have different scents; some are powerfully floral with notes of grape soda, others smell faintly of chocolate, while others give off the odor of sweaty gym shoes.

These bits of tangible data, he argues, are essential for inspiring the next generation of scientists. “By collecting, touching, smelling, and feeling, I think that kids get a much more valuable introduction to biology than they do just by using binoculars or cameras or whatever,” Robbins says. Despite their differences in opinion, Glassberg and Robbins have remained friends for 70 years; Robbins even served as a consultant for the National Butterfly Center.

Another butterfly researcher who views catching butterflies as a necessity is Arthur Shapiro, who grapples with the issue of specimen collection every two weeks, weather permitting. A professor at the University of California Davis, he lives in Northern California, where, over the last 50 years, he has amassed one of the world’s most thorough chronicles of butterfly population change. His data has shed light on regional variation in California butterflies and told the story of their gradual decline.

Regional variation in wing markings is virtually impossible to parse without side-by-side comparison, he says, and collection is a must for sequencing DNA. But as someone acutely aware of butterfly numbers, he is troubled by the thought of collecting specimens from diminishing populations. “I would be hesitant to remove individuals, especially females, for many species today,” he says.

Chris Grinter, the entomology collection manager at the California Academy of Sciences, sees work like Shapiro’s (and his own studies of micromoths) as indispensable chronicles of climate change. Grinter is a member of the Lepidopterists’ Society, a coalition of professional and amateur butterfly and moth researchers. He understands the instinct to push back against the practice of killing butterflies — but, he says he believes that collecting ultimately does way more scientific good than environmental harm. What’s more, Grinter thinks that focusing on collecting misses the larger picture.

“The real problem is habitat loss and destruction,” he says. About 20 million monarchs are killed by cars while migrating each year. That’s just a single species — thousands of others are affected by highways every day. The Lepidopterists’ Society has issued a statement that it sees collecting a few specimens here and there as insignificant by comparison.

Boston Globe via Getty Images
A Monarch butterfly rests on a flower on a fall day in Martha’s Vineyard. The infamous annual migration of the butterfly has become deadly for many of the insects, as fast-moving cars endanger the process.

Like Shapiro and Robbins, though, Grinter wouldn’t advocate collecting indiscriminately. “There’s rare species and populations that need to be protected,” he says.

But a new tool might someday alleviate much of the need to choose between science and conservation.

The rapid rise (and decreasing cost) of DNA technology has brought about a new technique that could complement many butterfly studies and greatly reduce the number that are dying for science.

Environmental DNA, or eDNA, refers to the loose bits of an organism’s genetic material floating around in soil, water, or air, that enters the environment through things like shed skin cells and saliva. Theoretically, if scientists are able to collect an adequate sample from a given habitat, they could sequence these bits and identify all of the organisms living there. The technology is still in its infancy, but it is quickly becoming a viable research option — scientists were recently able to identify all of the animals in two different zoos using nothing but DNA pulled from the air.

This technique holds particular promise for studying butterflies, which leave genetic traces behind when they land. eDNA has already been used in Denmark to identify which butterflies visited a patch of wildflowers. The technology still has a few limitations to work out; it doesn’t work well in certain conditions, for example, and requires an existing DNA “bank” of different species’ genetic sequences for comparison.

Valeria Lencioni, an entomologist at the Museo Delle Scienze in Trento, Italy, is currently in the process of creating such a database for alpine insects.

She has dedicated her career to Alpine midges, tiny bugs that live in frozen streams and are one of the best indicator species for both climate change and water quality. Today they’re in peril, which makes her research more vital than ever. But to study them, she has to kill them by the millions.

If eDNA sequencing becomes widely available, she and her fellow researchers won’t have to choose between data and conservation for many studies (though some questions, like variations among individual butterflies, would still require collecting insects).

But that solution may be too far in the future for the butterflies and other insect species in danger now. Ultimately, the best way to save insects is to advocate for big-picture goals: protecting and restoring precious habitat while eliminating harmful emissions. In the meantime, though, I’ve decided to swap my butterfly net for a new pair of binoculars.

Joanna Thompson is a science journalist and sometimes fast runner. You can find more of her work at Scientific American, Live Science, Atlas Obscura, and Audubon.

Sea lampreys are fish native to the Atlantic Ocean and the rivers that flow into it. But more than a century ago, they found their way into the Great Lakes, where they multiplied and became one of the most destructive invasive species in US history.

These creatures are parasites. To feed, they latch onto fish, bore into them, and start sucking down blood and body fluids, often killing their prey in the process. A single lamprey can kill up to 40 pounds of fish; and hordes of them threaten the Great Lakes fishing economy, which is valued at roughly $7 billion a year.

Marc Gaden/Great Lakes Fishery Commission
A salmon from Lake Huron with a sea lamprey attached to it.

Marlin Levison/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Sea lampreys are the largest of the lamprey species. Here, two lampreys caught in the Great Lakes.

Wildlife officials in the Great Lakes have been culling sea lampreys for several decades, largely using lamprey-specific pesticides. But paradoxically, sea lampreys are endangered in parts of their native range, including Western Europe and the northeastern US. Four species of native lampreys also live in the Great Lakes, which wildlife officials are trying to protect.

This raises a fundamental tension, common in invasive biology: How we treat a species depends largely on where it is, even if humans put it there. Looks matter, too. And lampreys in the Great Lakes are, unfortunately, unlucky in both respects.

What the heck is a sea lamprey?

Reaching up to a meter long, sea lampreys are the largest of 40 or so species of lamprey, a group of truly ancient animals. They’ve been on Earth for more than 350 million years, surviving no fewer than four major extinction events.

They’re an odd bunch, too. Like sharks, sea lampreys have no bones; like salmon, they swim upstream to spawn and can live in both salty and fresh water; and like frogs, they go through metamorphosis.

Then there are those mouths. They’re filled with concentric circles of teeth made of keratin (the stuff in your hair and nails), which they use to suction onto their prey. After they latch on, they bore into the flesh with a beak-like tongue.

R. McDaniels/Great Lakes Fishery Commission
Sea lamprey larvae that were killed by lampricide in Michigan.

Gruesome as that may sound, lampreys are a boon to ecosystems along the East Coast and in western Europe, where they’re native, according to Margaret Docker, a biologist at the University of Manitoba who’s been studying lampreys for more than 35 years. As larvae, lampreys are food for a wide variety of aquatic animals. The larvae live in stream beds, consuming dead or decaying matter that other animals can’t eat, helping cycle nutrients up the food chain.

After a few years (and sometimes much longer), larval lampreys metamorphose and become parasites, growing new mouths, gills, and functional eyes, and exit the stream in masses, Docker said. “A lot of marine mammals and other fish will wait at the river’s mouth for this flood of lampreys,” she said.

David Tipling/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A common merganser catches a lamprey in Dumfries, Scotland.

Even as parasites, sea lampreys aren’t a problem in their native range. They live in “peaceful coexistence” with other fish, Docker said. Sea lampreys tend to seek out larger fish, which can better survive an attack. They also have plenty of natural predators, including catfish, and other threats like dams, so there simply aren’t that many of them.

How sea lampreys became villains in the Great Lakes

Most species become “invasive” because of humans, whether it’s a predatory snail spreading north due to climate change or parachuting Joro spiders that likely traveled to the US on a container ship. Sea lampreys are no exception. They arrived in the Great Lakes sometime in the 1800s, most likely through the construction of canals. (Some scientists believe that sea lampreys are native to Lake Ontario. There’s also a much broader debate about the term “invasive.”)

Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images
A lake trout caught in Lake Superior with a sea lamprey bite.

With plenty of fish to prey on and few natural predators, lampreys thrived in the Great Lakes. And by the 1940s, they were in all five, according to the book Great Lakes Sea Lamprey: The 70 Year War on a Biological Invader by lamprey researcher Cory Brant.

At the same time, the region’s fisheries collapsed. The US and Canada had been harvesting roughly 15 million pounds of lake trout in the upper Great Lakes each year. But by the 1960s, that dropped to 300,000 pounds — just 2 percent of what it once was. “The sea lamprey threatens complete destruction of the Great Lakes fishing industry,” the South Bend Tribune reported in the spring of 1953. (Other threats including overfishing also played a role in the decline of Great Lakes’s fisheries.)

The region’s wildlife officials didn’t hesitate to fight back. In 1954, the US and Canada teamed up and launched an organization called the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC). Its mission, essentially, was — and still is — to kill sea lampreys.

A government assault on lampreys

The nation’s assault on sea lampreys is one of the most well organized and well funded efforts to control any invasive species. Its primary weapons are lampricides — namely, two pesticides that target lampreys but don’t seem to harm most other fish. (Scientists discovered them in the 1950s after painstakingly screening more than 7,000 substances.)

Each year, wildlife officials dump around 175,000 pounds of liquid lampricides into streams that flow into the Great Lakes, where they kill lampreys in their larval forms (they harm native lampreys, too). Officials also rely on small dams or barriers to prevent sea lampreys from migrating upstream to spawn.

In a typical year, GLFC — which spends roughly $25 million annually on sea lamprey control — kills roughly 7 million sea lampreys. So far this year, the death toll has reached 1.7 million, according to a kill ticker on its website.

M. Moriarty/US Fish and Wildlife Service
Barriers like this help prevent sea lampreys from swimming upstream to spawn.

Lampricides do their job well. Sea lampreys once destroyed more than 100 million pounds of fish each year in the Great Lakes, but today they kill less than 10 million pounds, according to GLFC. That likely comes with plenty of benefits for non-commercial fish and other organisms as well, experts say.

But even these gains are somewhat tenuous, according to Robert McLaughlin, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “Anytime that control is eased, they quickly start to rebound,” he said. “The numbers of them right now aren’t that high, but that’s because we’ve been controlling them for close to 70 years.”

Wildlife officials are also far from eradicating the animals altogether. Even though lampricides can kill 98 percent of larvae in a given stream, that leaves some behind to create the next generation, said Marc Gaden, communications director and legislative liaison at GLFC. Just one female lamprey can produce more than 100,000 eggs, he said. “You just can’t get every one of them,” he said, and going that last mile would be extremely expensive.

Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Sea lampreys have impressive mouths.

Scientists are now exploring more creative ways to suppress sea lampreys, including the application of scents and pheromones. Certain pheromones attract lampreys, which allows scientists to lure them into traps, while the concentrated smell of dead lampreys repels them. (This video shows what happens when you add lamprey repellent to a tank. Warning: it’s a bit gruesome).

Controlling sea lampreys has surely benefited fish and those who depend on them in the Great Lakes. But it’s worth pointing out that these efforts threaten the region’s native lampreys — which are susceptible to lampricides, too — and may be harming lampreys everywhere. “In the case of sea lamprey in their native range, there is no doubt that the public’s imagination has been strongly negatively influenced by the need to control the species in the Great Lakes,” authors of a recent study wrote.

Sea lampreys are considered “critically imperiled” in parts of the eastern US and “critically endangered” in parts of Europe, to say nothing of the other lamprey species, many of which are threatened with extinction. Yet, as Kelly Robinson, an ecology professor at Michigan State University, puts it, “everybody just thinks lampreys are terrible because of the Great Lakes.”

If nothing else, then, perhaps you can remember that sea lampreys (and other invasive species) aren’t inherently bad, gross as they may look. Some countries even revere them as a source of food. And even if you’re traveling to the Great Lakes and planning to take a dip, you don’t need to worry. Sea lampreys prefer fish to warm-blooded humans.

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From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit