NFR Lamprey Rescue thread starter

Non-fishing related
Gyrfalcon22

Gyrfalcon22

Legend
I looked for the Lamprey Rescue thread..but it must be overlooked for now, am sure we will get it rolling soon .. ;)

Today, I was heading over to look at birds in a field of ours that flooded a few weeks back. Most of the ponds are drying up. I was walking in one dried pond when I looked down and saw a Pacific lamprey in the grass and mud ! A big full-size adult. 17"-18" maybe (or an easy Oregon 20" for sure!..sorry southern brothers and sisters).

I have been walking to this pond for many days, maybe a couple of weeks even. I do not think it has had water for atleast a week. But there it was, a damp but alive lamprey. It moved when I touched it. The gills gasping for replenishment. I grabbed it and it was a hard wrestle. Strong creatures! I dropped it once thinking it was trying to clamp down on me..eventhough it has no jaws. The river is a half mile away. I knew it would be too stressed wriggling so I put in my wool hat to carry the beast. Made the fast 1/2 mile walk to the river and dropped it in. Seemed to take off fine.

Duty done. Surprised no bird or coyote had eaten it yet, I pondered, as I made my way back to check for the Golden eagle. Made it back to the muddy mucky former pond and guess what? Yep. Lamprey #2 was "looking" at me for help. Its gills were pumping like the other after being touched, really made me bring up the pace. This one did not struggle as much and I tossed it in my hat like any good cobra hunter would. Fast 1/2 mile walk back to the river, had a car go by and considered flagging them down to show them..but my reputation locally as a crazy birder is enough. This one really jetted away when it touched water.

In all my years on the river (lower coastal tidewater), have not seen all that many adults -dead or alive. Not sure why. Bad timing on my part? Low numbers? I have seen young ones occasionally at times. Surprised how long it must have stayed on land without water.
Question off to @Cabezon @Smalma -or others, how long can a lamprey live without water? They are not air gulpers like carp I assume? Maybe they have a prehistoric ability to survive out of water like a sturgeon does for longer than normal?

I know eels can stay alive for very extended times out of water. Guess we can add lamprey to the list as well ! It came in with the floods and hopefully can get a good spawn in now. I need to check more ponds soon. Used to rescue Chum fingerlings this time of year or a tad later in flood ponds, guess I better go check to see what else awaits.

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What a cool find and the way to go the extra mile for them.

Given that while ammocetes (larvae) they live in the fine sediments and much found in back waters eddies I would guess that they have a relatively low oxygen demand. That low oxygen needs coupled with the moist environment and cool temperature (key would be keeping their gills damp) allowed them to survive for an extended period. Many of the more primitive species seem to have the ability to survive longer than expected out of the water. Have heard multiple stories of sturgeon surviving hours out of the water, even overnight. I remember several pictures of them attempting to climb the rocks at barriers or the faces of dams by inching their up with their mouths hanging on those surfaces out of the water.

curt
 
I rescued a fish one time on the Sultan River. I was resting on a gravel bar. Well really laying on my back. I happened to look down and saw about a one inch long fish laying in the gravel. You could see where it's egg sac was on it's body. I placed it in the slow water at the edge of the gravel bar and it swam away. It was in the winter time. Salmon or Steelhead, I had no idea.
 
Awesome rescue, John!
 
Hi Gryfalcon,
Those are very amazing finds (and great job rescuing them). I totally agree with @Smalma that if the environment was moist and the temperatures cool, they could survive for several days out of water. With a long body, I suspect that they can pick up much of their oxygen needs through their skin, especially if they are not very active. This is actually an area that has been an active area of research (see Aerial respiration and aerial resiration). With lampreys, lamprey breathing and lamprey respiration indicate that they can breath in and out through their branchial sacs along the head.
Steve
 
Thank you @Smalma and @Cabezon for the information, you guys always have the great details. Really appreciate it. Will look at links you added, Steve. Excellent !

I guess there is a reason these primitive creatures like lamprey, sturgeon and sharks have made it so long and have not been forced to change much-they are tough as nails !! I have a little video but was too big to add, it does show the gills sacs opening and closing once I handled them.
John
 
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Very cool rescue x 2.

cheers
 
Good job going the extra mile to rescue those critters (bad pun intended!)

I haven’t seen those in a long long time.
We’d used to see little ones about 6-8 inches long in a small creek where we lived as a kid in a headwater to the Green R. Cool little creatures.
 
Thanks for posting that. I've never had the pleasure of seeing a lamprey before. I enjoyed this thread.
 
I rescued what may have been a surf perch? one time at one of the ocean beaches a long time ago but it didn't take near the effort that @Gyrfalcon22 made.
There were very shallow tide pools in a few sand depressions on an outgoing tide. One of the pools had a 6"-8" fish in it and shore birds were beginning to circle when I walked up. There was a little rivulet draining into the surf from a pool close by so I quickly created a small channel to the flowing water, which started the pool with the fish draining. I chased the fish into the channel where it turned upstream into the other pool. So I chased it out of that pool and it made it's way down to the surf. The predators I had deprived of their snack were probably pissed and flipped me the bird. I watched them follow the fish until it disappeared into the surf.
 
As a native Upstate New Yorker where I fished Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and lampreys are an invasive species, the thought of rescuing them makes me say, wait what? In the Finger Lakes where I grew up a lot of effort and expense was applied to keep them out. Treatment, I think, involved treating the sandy areas where the larvae incubated. I remember fishing the St. Lawrence with my grandfather (50s & 60s) and catching pike with lamprey wounds. The pike were able to peel them off, but the lake trout in Lake Ontario usually didn't do as well. Anyway, I grew up believing lampreys were the enemy of sport fish. Guess it boils down to native vs. invasive.
 
Steve Vaughn said:
As a native Upstate New Yorker where I fished Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and lampreys are an invasive species, the thought of rescuing them makes me say, wait what? In the Finger Lakes where I grew up a lot of effort and expense was applied to keep them out. Treatment, I think, involved treating the sandy areas where the larvae incubated. I remember fishing the St. Lawrence with my grandfather (50s & 60s) and catching pike with lamprey wounds. The pike were able to peel them off, but the lake trout in Lake Ontario usually didn't do as well. Anyway, I grew up believing lampreys were the enemy of sport fish. Guess it boils down to native vs. invasive.
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And in the PNW, returning lampreys were a key harvest for native tribes. Their populations have been badly impacted by dams and there are multiple efforts to rebuild their populations.
Steve
 
In the PNW we have 3 native lamprey species; the pacific, the river and western brook. The Pacific lamprey is one that we most often see (I have only seen one river lamprey). They typically spend several years (up to 6 years) in the ammocete or larvae stage before morphing into the parasitic adult stage. Most of our Pacific lampreys are anadromous though we sometimes see smaller landlock forms (including places like Lake Washington). We see the "smolt" stage (usually 5 or 6 inches long migrating downstream in our rivers at spring of the year like most of the salmonids. Once at sea they typically spend 1.5 to 3 years in the marine waters before returning to spawn. Here on the north Sound systems we see them spawning in May or early June. It is now thought that some of those spawners survive. During the mid-1980s those spawning lamprey were pretty common often spawning in the same sort of habitats that we see steelhead. They are mass sapwners (have seen up to a couple dozen on a single "redd". While their redd look similar to a steelhead because of differences in how that redd is constructed there are subtle differences.. They construct the redd by getting a hold of the stone with their sucker like mouth and packing the stone downstream away from the redd site. Because of the size of the lamprey there is a limit to the size of rocks they can move (usually around fist size) thus the subtle redd differences. The spawn over the redd broadcasting their eggs in small batchers (a few hundred at a time) covering the small eggs (1 mm) with small pebbles and sand. An individual female can have 10,000s of eggs to as 1/4 millions.

The other common PNW lamprey is the brook which in non-parasitic. with only a freshwater life history. The ammocetes transform to that non-feeding stage to only spawn.

Just a couple of our interesting native fishes.

BTW in light to another ongoing thread those Pacific lamprey "smolts" are bull trout candy and I typically have couple lamprey smolt flies in my bull trout box.

curt
 
Yup, there are definetly is a unique landlocked lamprey in the Lake Washington Basin I remember seeing very small lamprey (3 inches at the most) in Kelsey Creek in Bellevue. At the time I was stumped trying to ID them.
 
Steve Vaughn said:
As a native Upstate New Yorker where I fished Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and lampreys are an invasive species, the thought of rescuing them makes me say, wait what? In the Finger Lakes where I grew up a lot of effort and expense was applied to keep them out. Treatment, I think, involved treating the sandy areas where the larvae incubated. I remember fishing the St. Lawrence with my grandfather (50s & 60s) and catching pike with lamprey wounds. The pike were able to peel them off, but the lake trout in Lake Ontario usually didn't do as well. Anyway, I grew up believing lampreys were the enemy of sport fish. Guess it boils down to native vs. invasive.
Click to expand...

Growing up in Montreal and fishing the St. Lawrence, I remember the exact same, lamprey were parasites and to be loathed. I also used to sail in the St Lawrence, and any time I took a dunk, always had this creepy feeling that some lamprey was gonna latch on and that would be it. Hard to get over these prejudices.

cheers
 
Steve Vaughn said:
As a native Upstate New Yorker where I fished Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and lampreys are an invasive species, the thought of rescuing them makes me say, wait what? In the Finger Lakes where I grew up a lot of effort and expense was applied to keep them out. Treatment, I think, involved treating the sandy areas where the larvae incubated. I remember fishing the St. Lawrence with my grandfather (50s & 60s) and catching pike with lamprey wounds. The pike were able to peel them off, but the lake trout in Lake Ontario usually didn't do as well. Anyway, I grew up believing lampreys were the enemy of sport fish. Guess it boils down to native vs. invasive.
Click to expand...
I grew up fishing in Lake Erie on the Canadian side and remember well reeling in perch, bass and even carp that had lamprey scars. As a kid, it really turned me off seeing it as if they were diseased. We always looked at them as a menace that had to be eliminated, I still feel that way like they are a parasite..
 
I saw my first local lamprey as a student at UW. The fisheries methods field trips included an outing to a creek that drained into lake WA to learn about backpack electrofishing. While I remember catching mostly sculpins and minnows, we got a few juvenile lampreys. A few years later I was working with a research team doing fish and habitat surveys in the Cedar River. Again we would occasionally find juvenile lamprey while electrofishing in the mucky side channels. Watching a bunch of ammocaetes rise like black spaghetti noodles from the mud in shallow water was a memorable experience!

About 10 years ago I got involved with monitoring adult Pacific lamprey in the upper Columbia River. lampreys returning from the ocean were PIT-tagged at Bonneville Dam and detected at each fish ladder on their upstream journey. From that experience I learned that the adults heading for the Wenatchee and Methow often overwinter in the mainstem Columbia Hanford Reach then complete their migration the following spring/summer. Actively migrating lamprey often cover the distance between dams in about the same time as Chinook salmon!

The upper Columbia tribes actively translocate Pacific lamprey from the lower river to the Methow and Okanogan in hopes of reversing their decline in those basins. There are active research programs in the Yakima and Umatilla rivers to learn to raise lamprey in captivity.

A research team at PNNL in Richland has developed a micro acoustic tag designed to be implanted in downstream migrant juvenile Pacific lamprey to study their migration behaviors and dam passage, just as has been done with juvenile salmon the last 25 years.

One last anecdote. A few years ago I was camping with my family along the Smith River in the redwoods. On a hot day we were swimming and my son noticed several sculpins in the shallows. We made a game of catching them. The first one had a “worm” in its mouth. Actually a lamprey ammoceate! The sculpins were hunting juvenile lamprey and once I stopped moving and just watched, I saw the lampreys actively popping up and burrowing in the silt. My kids still talk about it.
 
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