A Vampire Story

It's hard to blame sportsmen and outdoor writers for not grasping the value of native saltwater lampreys when some managers are just as ignorant. In Maine the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and the Division of Marine Resources interdict spawning lampreys west of the Penobscot River and let them go to the east (where there are essentially no dams for interdiction). "Why?" Gephard keeps asking.

When I repeated the question to Fred Kircheis he said: "Uninformed bias." The superstition that saltwater lampreys are somehow "bad" started in the 1960's when a few "transformers" (newly metamorphosed larvae trying to get to sea) left scars on landlocked salmon in Sheepscot Lake. Usually transformers are just hitchhiking, but if they do feed (because low water temporarily blocks seaward migration), they're so small they apparently don't kill their hosts.

Because Maine Atlantic salmon and other native anadromous fish evolved with sea lampreys and need them, the state's anti-lamprey bias has long infuriated TU's New England conservation director, Jeff Reardon. Currently, he's trying to remove a useless dam on the Sheepscot River. "I thought we were ready to move on this a year ago," he told me. "Then there was a huge blowup about lampreys. The Maine agencies wanted to use the dam as a lamprey barrier. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency(?)) , which would be providing funding to remove the dam or build a fishway, have been telling the state agencies, 'Look, if there's a reason to exclude lampreys, tell us what it is.'" They can't because there isn't.

Thoughtful anglers who notice and appreciate the natural world need to carefully consider sea lampreys in all waters, fresh and salt. Lampreys may suck. But, then, so do bonefish, humming birds, butterflies, and human infants. Sea lampreys everywhere teach us that, in nature, "ugliness" is a word that applies only to ecological messes-messes that, without exception, are made by humans when they destroy beautiful and complex machinery or toss parts where they don't belong.