‘Trash fish’ a big key to sustainability

Decline of lowly Pacific lamprey is cause for concern

By Cliff Newell

The Lake Oswego Review, Apr 10, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Robin Lewis

A Pacific lamprey is shown nestling at the mouth of the Klamath River in California. Once a staple of the rivers of the Northwest, the fish has been making a mysterious disappearance.

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In the fish kingdom, the Pacific lamprey pretty well scrapes the bottom when it comes to prestige.

In fact, over in the Great Lakes the lamprey are considered strictly a nuisance, an invasive species that is choking the streams for more worthwhile fish. The objective there is to kill them all off.

“They’ve been labeled a trash fish,” said Robin Lewis, restoration coordinator for Friends of Tryon Creek State Park.

But when it comes to sustainability in the Northwest, the Pacific lamprey are very important, indeed. They are a native species to this region, and their mysterious decline in recent years is truly cause for concern.

If the Pacific lamprey disappears, what will disappear next? Probably a much more prestigious fish like the salmon. And the disappearing won’t stop there.

“This has been a pretty adaptable fish that’s been around for tens of thousands of years,” said Lewis. “It has strong connections to other species. Its population decline has been going so rapidly for the past 10 or 15 years that it’s really notable.

“What’s going on? What does this mean for everything else?”

Not everyone considers the Pacific lamprey a trash fish, which Lewis has discovered through personal investigation. While working for her master’s degree in applied anthropology, she did interviews with the Yurok and Karuk tribes of the Klamath River Basin in Northern California.

“Native American tribes see them as highly valuable,” Lewis said. “They’re considered an important ceremonial food. Those tribes were the first who noticed the decline, because they used to harvest thousands of them at a time and feed a whole village. Now they’re not getting any.”

Due to the generally low esteem with which they are held, the Pacific lamprey have not received a great deal of attention from biologists. But at the places where data has been taken, big drops in population were recorded.

The reason for the decline could be a combination of these factors:

n Human influence in California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

n Dams changing the way water flows.

n Draining of wetland.

n Logging, which causes erosion.

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