![]() ![]() In the Connecticut River’s main stem, Gephard sees the carcasses of spawned-out lampreys seething with feeding caddisfly larvae, prime forage for birds and dozens of fish species. A typical lamprey female will produce around 200,000 eggs, so there are enough to share.” ![]() As we watch, the heads of small American eels-elvers-protrude from the gravel in search of eggs. Even when an egg falls amongst the gravel, it may not be safe. Dozens of common shiners, the males displaying vivid flashes of orange on their fins, are darting in and out of the nest, snatching the tiny eggs before they sink to the bottom. Writing in the May 2022 issue of Estuary magazine, Gephard and his colleague, fisheries consultant Sally Harold, reported what they observed while snorkeling downstream of a communal lamprey nest: “An entire school of spottail shiners is lingering, intimidated by our presence and gobbling any errant eggs that are swept past the gravel mound. The opposition to sea lamprey disappeared quickly in Connecticut, followed by the other Connecticut River states, and finally most of New England.” “No erroneous statements or misrepresentations were left unchallenged. “Connecticut was the first state to publicly contradict the commonly held belief about sea lamprey and took every opportunity to educate the public and promote restoration,” says Gephard. Sea lampreys don’t return home to natal rivers like salmon, so when Connecticut transfers lampreys to former habitat, the entire Atlantic Coast benefits. Not only is it removing dams and impassable culverts, it’s the only state restoring extinct sea-lamprey runs by translocating larvae and pre-spawn adults. The global leader in both sea lamprey recovery and education is Connecticut. Maine researchers report that small fish are growing faster and larger around the communal lamprey nests and that brook trout and salmon are spawning in the wide expanses of gravel that lampreys clear of silt. On Maine’s Penobscot River, lamprey runs are exploding now that the biggest river-recovery project in North America has removed two dams and bypassed a third, opening 2,000 additional miles of habitat. Today the department is completely on board with lamprey recovery. But when low water temporarily blocks access to the sea, they occasionally feed, with scant damage to hosts. Usually, he explains, transformers are just hitchhiking by merely sucking onto fish. When Fred Kircheis was directing the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission, he attributed the department’s persecution of lampreys to “uninformed bias” and the fact that “transformers” (newly metamorphosed larvae) left scars the width of a pencil on a few landlocked salmon in Sheepscot Lake. And it opposed dam removal on the Sheepscot River (completed in 2019) because it would let lampreys access historical spawning habitat. ![]() As recently as the early 2000s, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife was capturing and killing spawning sea lampreys. And because of the Great Lakes catastrophe, appreciation for them is an ongoing process. There’s recovery work, especially in Portugal, where the species is listed as “vulnerable.”īut in North America, lampreys have been largely ignored as food. In a fit of royal gluttony, King Henry I of England is said to have died from a “surfeit of lamprey.” In Spain, Portugal, and France, they’re still commercially fished. Sea lampreys are a traditional delicacy in Europe. The most recent international status assessment lists it as “critically imperiled” in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The US Fish and Wildlife Service now recognizes the Pacific lamprey as a “high conservation risk” in most river basins. Pacific lampreys are highly valued for food, ceremonies, and medicine by tribes in the Pacific Northwest, and these tribes are driving recovery. The native habitat of Pacific lampreys extends from the Aleutians to Baja California, and from Siberia to Japan. The native habitat of sea lampreys extends from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Norway to the Mediterranean. When they run up freshwater streams to spawn, they can’t “suck the life out of their host fish” because they go blind and lose their teeth. But in saltwater, lampreys are in natural balance and deplete nothing. ![]()
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