I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. About a hundred years ago, the Great Lakes got some creepy-looking

visitors. They moved in, bullied their neighbors, and eventually tried to take over the place.

I am talking about a fish, the dreaded sea lamprey.

People dedicated their entire careers to getting these lampreys out

because they nearly destroyed the entire fishing industry in the Great Lakes,

which is huge, like $6 billion a year.

The effort worked for a while, but now, thanks to federal budget cuts, it's not clear who

will win.

Great Lakes or the lampraise.

Katie Thornton wrote an article about all this for The New Yorker, and she's here to tell us

about it. Hey, Katie. Hi, and she's here to tell us about it.

Hey, Katie.

Hi, Kelly.

So for people who don't know, what even is a sea lamprey?

Like, what do these things look like?

A sea lamprey is a very frightening-looking fish, I will say.

It kind of looks like something right out of a horror movie.

They're long, skinny.

They kind of look like eels, though they're not eels.

And they end in these circular mouths, these sort of suction cup mouths that are like four times stronger than a vacuum cleaner.

And inside the mouth, there's dozens and dozens of these tiny razor-sharp teeth,

...