How to Use sea lamprey in a Sentence

sea lamprey

noun
  • There’s my colleague, latched onto John Thune like a sea lamprey.
    Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 29 June 2017
  • The department says sea lamprey spawn each spring in the main stem of the Connecticut River and in many tributaries.
    USA TODAY, 10 June 2019
  • The average sea lamprey kills up to 40 pounds of fish during its adult, parasitic stage.
    John Myers, Twin Cities, 13 Nov. 2019
  • Native to the Atlantic Ocean, the sea lamprey has survived four mass extinctions over 350 million years, Shaw said.
    Peter Krouse, cleveland, 7 July 2022
  • Scientists also are turning to other creative ways to rid the lakes of sea lampreys.
    Detroit Free Press Staff, Detroit Free Press, 22 May 2018
  • But the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department says that sea lamprey are native to the state's freshwater ecosystem and keep the food chain in balance.
    Scottie Andrew, CNN, 27 June 2020
  • The Fishery Commission must decide each year where to devote its attention to sea lamprey, Gaden said.
    Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press, 25 Sep. 2020
  • Bryan, who was born in Chicago, was familiar with the invasive sea lamprey, an eel-like creature that latches onto fish and drains their blood.
    Morgan Greene, chicagotribune.com, 2 June 2021
  • But the king of the lake was toppled by a nearly simultaneous invasion of the Atlantic Ocean sea lamprey, which also slithered into the lakes through the Welland Canal.
    Dan Egan, jsonline.com, 2 Sep. 2021
  • The groups say the project will restore 3 miles of a migratory corridor that benefits alewife as well as sea lamprey and American eel.
    USA TODAY, 14 Nov. 2019
  • After the non-native sea lamprey and alewife flooded into the lake, native lake trout and burbot were decimated.
    Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 16 Oct. 2022
  • However, a non-native species of sea lamprey is considered an invasive species in Lake Champlain on the state's western border, the post said.
    Alec Snyder, CNN, 25 June 2020
  • While their population has been reduced 90%, the sea lamprey control program costs about $16 million each year.
    Tony Briscoe, chicagotribune.com, 21 June 2019
  • Some Great Lakes fish have struggled through overfishing, pollution, the arrival of alewives and the devastation wrought by the invasive blood-sucking sea lamprey.
    Morgan Greene, chicagotribune.com, 30 July 2021
  • Lake trout, once devastated by parasitic sea lamprey, have bounced back in recent decades because of lamprey controls and trout restoration efforts.
    John Flesher, USA TODAY, 13 Dec. 2022
  • Their numbers were decimated during the past century after the introduction of the non-native sea lamprey.
    Jason Treat, Magazine, 17 Nov. 2020
  • Officials say adult sea lamprey die shortly after returning to freshwater to spawn.
    USA TODAY, 10 June 2019
  • But a quadruple whammy of overfishing, sea lamprey predation, alewife invasion and habitat degradation caused stocks of the lake's top native predator to plummet.
    Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 28 Apr. 2018
  • As native lake trout and burbot were decimated in Lake Michigan by overfishing, pollution and sea lamprey parasitism through the early and mid-1900s, alewife numbers soared.
    Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 8 June 2022
  • The primary culprit was the sea lamprey, a parasitic aquatic invasive species which devastated lake trout and burbot populations in the lake.
    Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 23 Feb. 2023
  • Great Lakes' native lake trout populations were dwindling, overfished by commercial fishermen and preyed upon by invasive sea lampreys, an eel-like fish with a sharp-toothed suction mouth that looks like something straight out of the Alien movie.
    Keith Matheny, USA TODAY, 23 Oct. 2017
  • Controlling and eradicating invasive species in the Great Lakes — where vampiric sea lamprey once sucked the life out of fisheries and today zebra and quagga mussels reign in the hundreds of trillions — is an ongoing challenge.
    Morgan Greene, chicagotribune.com, 19 Jan. 2022
  • Controlling invasive species is among the great challenges in the Great Lakes, where the bloodsucking sea lamprey once devastated fisheries, and zebra and quagga mussels have blanketed entire lakes.
    Morgan Greene, chicagotribune.com, 14 Dec. 2021
  • Since the lake trout, the lake's native top predator, was decimated in the early to mid 20th century by invasive sea lampreys and other non-native fish such as the alewife flooded in, Lake Michigan has been significantly altered.
    Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 14 Sep. 2019
  • Lake Michigan was barely recovering from an onslaught of invasive species, including the sea lamprey which had devastated the populations of the two top native predator fish, the lake trout and burbot.
    Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 3 July 2022
  • Biologists call it a success story produced by a better understanding of the salmon, reduction in the numbers of parasitic sea lamprey, and help the fish got in navigating around dams responsible for the loss of the original salmon in the 1800s.
    Wilson Ring, The Seattle Times, 3 Sep. 2017
  • In the Great Lakes, conservationists battle invasive sea lampreys, overfished in their home region of southwestern Europe.
    Marion Renault, New York Times, 13 Aug. 2019
  • To environmentalists, the early grass carp invasion is a reminder of what happened with the eel-like sea lamprey, the parasitic fish responsible for crashing the native lake trout population.
    Tony Briscoe, chicagotribune.com, 21 June 2019
  • History: While these Great Lakes natives remain plentiful in certain parts of the lakes, whitefish populations were affected by the invasion of sea lamprey and commercial over-fishing.
    jsonline.com, 2 Sep. 2021
  • About 90% of his perch comes from Canadian fishers using Lake Erie, and that supply is down dramatically, likely because of overfishing, pollution and invasion of the sea lamprey and other foreign species.
    Patti Zarling, chicagotribune.com, 21 Oct. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sea lamprey.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: