Why are environmental groups and fishing advocates suddenly welcoming back the sea lamprey, a fish once almost wiped out by human intervention? It's not because they are funny— all of their jokes suck! 📷: Getty Images
But in saltwater, lampreys are in natural balance and deplete nothing. 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.
Pacific lampreys are highly valued for food, ceremonies, and medicine by tribes in the Pacific Northwest, and these tribes are driving recovery. The US Fish and Wildlife Service now recognizes the Pacific lamprey as a “high conservation risk” in most river basins. The most recent international status assessment lists it as “critically imperiled” in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. And Mexico lists it as “threatened.
But in North America, lampreys have been largely ignored as food. And because of the Great Lakes catastrophe, appreciation for them is an ongoing process. As recently as the early 2000s, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife was capturing and killing spawning sea lampreys. And it opposed dam removal on the Sheepscot River because it would let lampreys access historical spawning habitat.
Today the department is completely on board with lamprey recovery. 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. 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.
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