This thesis examined alarm cue application techniques to prevent habituation from occurring in sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus), offering insights to sea lamprey's behavioral response to alarm cue in context of its use as behavioral management tool. Semiochemicals like alarm cues have the potential to be utilized by managers as behavioral tool as they can guide an animal's response and movement. Alarm cues are released from damaged tissues when an animal is injured, such as an attack, warning nearby conspecifics of a predation event. Sea lamprey, a species of management concern in the Laurentian Great Lakes, respond to their alarm cue with spatial avoidance and increased swimming speed, moving out of the affected area. Previous work has indicated that sea lamprey habituate to their alarm cue within four hours of continuous exposure. To examine habituation prevention, application techniques tested included modulating the strength of the alarm cue and the interval at which it was applied (i.e., pulsing the alarm cue). Overall, we found that the presence of alarm cue increased upstream movement and sea lamprey with slower upstream movement avoided the alarm cue side. This suggests the more time spent gathering information about the alarm cue, the better sea lamprey were able to avoid the predation risk. The application that had the best implications for management was a pulse conditioning treatment that altered alarm cue dilutions between 1 ppm and 10 ppm, every 15 min. After 4h of conditioning to this treatment, sea lamprey maintained their response to the alarm cue. A continuous pulsed treatment is practical for management purposes as the guiding odor, alarm cue will be continuously present in the system for sea lamprey to detect and respond to.
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