Pacific lamprey are not endearing at first glance. The most striking feature of their almost featureless bodies is their soul-boring cobalt-blue eyes. But what you can never unsee is the “oral disc,” a jawless, hook-toothed sucker mouth that seems perfect for gobbling space mercenaries into sand dunes. “They look like scary-ass monsters,” said Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe and a former fish biologist. Ralph Lampman, a lamprey research biologist at Yakama Fisheries, compared lamprey to Yoda and said they have the wisdom of Jedi masters.
Lamprey hail from the infraphylum Agnatha, jawless fish with a spinal cord but no vertebrae — only a terrifying cartilage skeleton. Don’t Google it. Like salmon, they’re anadromous, growing up in freshwater before migrating out to sea. They return to spawn but lack site fidelity, meaning they don’t return to their home spawning grounds. An adult lamprey in the Columbia River could have hatched upstream in Russia or Japan. They can swim a thousand miles inland, even to landlocked Idaho, where they spawn and die, depositing marine-derived nutrients that grow Pacific conifer forests, including the mighty redwoods—a peer amongst the oldest living things on earth. “Forests and trees are made of fish,” said Keith Parker, Yurok tribal member and senior fisheries biologist with the Yurok Fisheries Department. If they come upon a waterfall, lamprey don’t stop. Lamprey have sucker mouths. Lamprey climb. They inch up wet surfaces with a leap-and-latch shimmy that, when populations were high, left rocks blanketed in a wriggling mass.
While salmon get good publicity for being yummy, healthy and beautiful, their ugly cousins are the true superfood — 4.1 times as rich in omega-3 fatty oils (which boost baby brain development and could prevent psychopathology), and with over four times the calories of salmon, despite being smaller. Sea lions will swim past salmon for a chance to catch a lamprey. “It’s pretty much the healthiest seafood in the world,” said Lampman.
There’s something about lamprey that hooks people, converting them into enthusiasts, much like cat ladies, if cats were creepy prehistoric fish. “Lamprey have a way of bringing people together,” said Kelly Coates, a tribal member and Water and Environmental Resources Program manager with the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, adding that they “sort of look like Bullwinkle” during their maturation phase. A few years ago, Coates and other tribal representatives helped the Oregon Zoo build a culturally specific lamprey exhibit — only the second place in the West to actually charge people to look at these creatures. (The first was the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon. A third exhibit opened at the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, California, continuing a model of Native-led species ambassadorship.)
“It’s pretty much the…
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