Dispersal and survival of sea lamprey in Lake Erie and connected waterways

Invasive sea lamprey inhabiting the North American Laurentian Great Lakes
are the target of the world’s longest running vertebrate invasive species
control program. However, metapopulation dynamics comprising survival and
dispersal during the sea lampreys’ lake-resident life stages are poorly
understood. We applied acoustic telemetry and continuous-time multistate
capture-recapture modeling to address this knowledge gap in Lake Erie. We
acoustic-tagged sea lamprey (n = 619) and deployed acoustic receivers into
all known connected waterways containing larval sea lamprey rearing
habitat (n = 23), including the Detroit River (connecting Lake Erie to
Lake Huron) and distributaries to Lake Ontario. Distribution of tagged sea
lamprey to putative spawning waterways was shaped by heterogeneous stream
attractiveness and distance-limited dispersal. Using parameter estimates
from our capture-recapture model and simulation, we predicted survival and
dispersal outcomes for a hypothetical sea lamprey population evenly
distributed throughout Lake Erie at the beginning of January (34%
pre-spawn mortality, 45% dispersal into Lake Erie tributaries, 19%
dispersal into the Detroit River, and 2% dispersal into Lake Ontario). The
methodology we applied may be widely useful for investigating dispersal
and survival of aquatic organisms.