“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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. Lamprey control costs $15 to $20 million a year and without it, ongoing lake-trout recovery would be impossible, and populations of all other sport fish would crash.īut in saltwater, lampreys are in natural balance and deplete nothing. In 1955, Canada and the United States established the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, which controls lampreys with barriers, traps, and a remarkably selective larvae poison called TFM. Why this summer will the first big returns from stocked Pacific lampreys - a species similar to sea lampreys - climb specially-designed lamprey ramps at Columbia River dams and surge into historical spawning habitat in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho?Īnd why, when the canal at Turners Falls on the Connecticut River is drawn down in September, will the Connecticut River Conservancy, Fort River Watershed Association, and the Biocitizen environmental school rescue stranded sea lamprey larvae?īy the 1960s, non-native sea lampreys had reduced the annual commercial take of lake trout in the upper Great Lakes from about 15 million pounds to half a million pounds. If that’s true, why this spring is Trout Unlimited - the nation’s leading advocate for trout and salmon - assisting the Town of Wilton, Connecticut and an environmental group called “Save the Sound” in a project that will restore 10 miles of sea lamprey spawning habitat on the Norwalk River? The fish ladders ought to be used to diminish the lamprey.” So editorialized the Lawrence (Massachusetts) Eagle-Tribune on Decem. literally suck the life out of their host fish, namely small-scale fish such as trout and salmon.
This is a predator that wiped out the Great Lakes lake-trout fishery. “Thousands of sea lamprey are passed upstream each year.
0 kommentar(er)
