Word: lampreys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...spurt of one of the most carefully wasted literary talents of the century, Author Henry Miller admits readers into his own first meeting with Conrad Moricand. Conrad must be conceded to be one of the least lovely characters of modern times. He was an astrologer, drug addict, scholar, louse, lamprey or -to reduce it all to Miller's own explicit prose-a "phoney bastard...
...Lamprey Moricand attached himself to Miller in Paris in 1936. Once he had been rich, but by then he was destitute, his only assets being the fine art of conversation and the black art of astrology. Miller gave him minute sums of money, and served him up as a dinner-table oddity among the bohemian intellectuals and expatriates. Miller also got him astrological commissions among his friends and, when friends ran short, invented imaginary characters for whom Moricand would supply horoscopes. It proved to be an expensive game...
...nuisances are rapidly becoming more selective, so that they do their job without hurting species that man wants to preserve. Last week Dr. James W. Moffett of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was getting encouraging results with a selective chemical designed to deal with the predatory eellike sea lamprey which has invaded the Great Lakes and almost exterminated the valuable lake trout (TIME, May 9). The lamprey, which bypassed Niagara Falls via the Welland Ship Canal, attaches itself to fish with a tooth-armed sucker and bores and sucks them to death. It has done so much damage...
...lamprey's chief weakness is its breeding system; the adults (up to 2 ft. long) swim up rivers in early spring to spawn. The young lampreys, which look like minute worms, bury themselves in mud and lead a wormlike life, eating microorganisms. After five years of this, when they are 7 in. long, they develop toothy suckers and drift downstream to hunt fish in the lake...
...Canadian lamprey fighters have had some success with electrically charged fences built across the lampreys' favorite streams. Adult lampreys are killed or driven back by the electricity before they can spawn, but good fish are affected, too, and the fences are expensive to build and operate. Dr. Moffett felt it would be much better to find some chemical that would kill the infant lampreys in their burrows. The poison would have to spare the desirable fish that use the same streams, and no such chemical was known. So Moffett sent out a call for help, asking universities and industrial...