Video of effective sea lamprey repellant

Photo: US EPA Great Lakes National Program Office

This sea lamprey repellant (made from sea lampreys!) does the trick.

Video of effective sea lamprey repellant

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

http://kylerconway.wordpress.com/ Kyle Reynolds Conway

If only Adam West had this in a spray can decades ago…
Mister44

I saw this the other day. Pretty damn effective.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ed-Hawkes/1375348681 Ed Hawkes

Reminds me of the eel scene from the book The Tin Drum.
cymk

Heres the underwater view:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBvYCBk_ZHM&feature=player_embedded

Nothing says GTFO like rotting flesh
- bklynchris
  
  Bwahaha, one of the responses on yt was, “Why is that poop swimming”!
Brainspore

Yep. Mynocks, chewing on the power cables.
voiceinthedistance

I prefer not to piss them off. Nothing keeps me up late at night more than the thought of an angry lamprey in my shorts.
Pippi

Gaagh sea lampreys!! So creeped out right now.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Cynthia-Bonville/100000861934243 Cynthia Bonville

Is it bad to feel sorry for them? I mean, they are so successful at what they do and we punish them for it.
- EH
  
  Sure, you can feel sorry for them, but in certain areas they are an invasive species:
  
  http://michiganradio.org/post/sea-lampreys-gaining-upper-hand#.TjhQpuRKO1o.email
KBert

Replace those relatively loveable piranhas from ‘Evil Genius deathtrap’
Navin_Johnson

They need to figure out a way to have lampreys and Asian carp destroy each other.
Trader Tim

Here’s the story behind the video:

http://news.msu.edu/sea-lampreys-fear-smell-of-death
nosehat

I’m pretty sure that if you poured dead human over me, I’d freak out too.
- Peter James
  
  Yeah, I was just thinking, pour a bucket full of chopped up people into a pool and one imagines a similar response.
Bodhipaksa

It took me a while to work out that this wasn’t a repellant video of an effective sea lamprey (and I was *very* curious to find out exactly what an effective sea lamprey was).
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1345484064 Nancy J Gill

So, what happens when they stop? Why do they stop? Does it wear off that fast? It’s going to require a gigantic continuous supply to keep them away permanently, right? And are they just more pissed off and meaner after their exposure to the repellent? Somebody hasn’t thought through this, it sounds like.
Rich Keller

Wasn’t Agnatha one of Samantha’s aunts on Bewitched?
cdh1971

lampreys are a delicacy in Europe and Asia. They were a traditional food source for Native Americans in the North West – the Columbia River – until the dams were built.

The lampreys have a lifecycle similar to the salmon – live adult life in the ocean, then go back to freshwater streams to spawn and die and etcetera. The fish ladders that aid salmon returning to spawn actually hinder the lampreys. The effect is that lampreys are very scarce and the Natives cannot harvest as many as they used to. Officials are now studying ways of adapting things to make it easier for lampreys to spawn.
http://twitter.com/cpat71 Carrie Patrick

I would use sea lamprey repellant constantly, even on land and thousands of miles from the ocean. Because just LOOK at those things. You can never be too careful when it comes to sea lampreys.
- hightechdave
  
  Totally agree where can I buy this stuff?!
http://twitter.com/cicadamania Cicada Mania

On an episode of Dirty Jobs, the lampreys freaked out when Mike Rowe spit into their tank. Try “hocking a loogey” next time a lamprey steps to you.
- Mister44
  
  Maybe Mike Rowe’s mouth smells like dead lamprey.
  - thatbob
    
    I think you meant “*Most likely* Mike Rowe’s mouth smells like dead lamprey.”
Kommkast

Catching a fish loaded with these evil things while your fishing in Lake Michigan is always fun ya know.
HenryPootel

Sup lamprey, I herd you dont like lamprey, so I put a lamprey in your lamprey so you can suck while you suck.
piminnowcheez

The scientist or technician who dumped the stuff in the tank must have nerves of steel. If that’d been me, you would have seen me drop the cup and run away squealing and flailing my arms until found a lab bench to climb up on, to get away from any lampreys who came flying out of the tank.

What I’m saying is, eek.
Xof

Going from a tank of lampreys kind of hanging out at the bottom minding their own business to enraged panicked lampreys leaping out of the tank in a frenzy.

I do not this is an improvement.
zombiebob

I really can’t imagine eating one of those… it activates those disgust muscles that crinkle up my nose
billster

This reminds me of the scene in Caddyshack where a Baby Ruth is thrown into the pool. I wonder which part of the lamprey was used to make the repellant.
TC Carter

If I’m not mistaken, you may want to spell that as ‘repellent’ in place of ‘repellant’, I’m sure it was just a typo. Or am I missing something?
- Bodhipaksa
  
  Thank you. *That’s* why I couldn’t make sense of the headline when I first read it (see comment above).
Telegram Sam

I trust this isn’t the same formula taken off the market several decades ago because it attracted monkeys.
twency

I almost feel bad for the little suckers.
jimkirk

I think H. P. Lovecraft designed them.
bklynchris

Dear sweet jesus, what fresh hell is this?
hypnosifl

Despite being totally gross, lampreys are kind of cool in that they are a kind of “living fossil”, having diverged from the lineage that produced fish with jaws (and us!) very early on (though lancelets diverged even earlier)…see this article.
pauljodi

If only we could develop a lamprey-torturer repellent.