on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Love Me, I’m a Lamprey

Ask not what the eel can do for you …

(Jan. 29, 2009) “… Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right….” — Rev. Joseph Lowery, in his benediction at the swearing in of President Barack Obama

On the north spit at the mouth of the Klamath River, a worried-looking (or so we imagine) Pacific lamprey awaits its fate: someone’s smokehouse, or perhaps more immediately a dinner plate. Photo by Heidi Walters

GALLERY >

The lamprey has existed unchanged for at least 360 million years — almost since the time vertebrates started walking out of the water onto land. Sure, it has undergone minor diversification in size and habits, but overall it has remained the same: jawless, scaleless, boneless and long-bodied, with a cartilage spine and a suctoral disc — a nightmare mouth — whose ring of teeth is designed to latch onto prey and extract bodily fluids (though they don’t all do this). It has changed the least of any vertebrate living today, and is one of only two jawless vertebrates — the other is the hagfish — that survived the major extinction events that obliterated less stalwart brethren.

In some places, like the Great Lakes, the lamprey — specifically the sea lamprey, an East Coast species — is a voracious, introduced monster to be destroyed. On the West Coast, however, the lamprey is a poorly understood being. And many of its species, after getting by famously for almost 400 million years, have experienced a rapid decline in numbers in the past 50 years.

This is not good. And for some people, such as the Pacific Northwest tribes who have eaten and celebrated the Pacific lamprey, specifically, for thousands of years, it is a calamity. What’s more, if the lampreys go, some say that could have implications for the more charismatic fish in our streams and ocean, the salmon.

Jan. 20, 2009. Inauguration Day. Midday at the mouth of the Klamath River, north spit, the second good week of eel season. All is sunshine. It is, in fact, stupefyingly warm. You just want to lie down on the pebbly beach and nap. Watch the sea lions surf the waves. Keep an eye on the line of eelers standing at attention at water’s edge, tending the curls of surf that crash into the broad, racing tumble of river.

Each man holds a carved wood stick in one hand, attached to a long, hooked wire for snagging lamprey — which the Yurok and other local tribes call an “eel” because of its looks: long, tubular, sleek. But eels have jaws, unlike this creature. In Yurok, it is “kah-ween.”

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