Monday July 21, 2025
ICT News —
On a sunny day in July, I join a small crowd at the Bonneville Dam outside Cascade Locks, Ore. I’m here for Lampreypalooza, a daylong celebration honoring the Columbia River Basin’s least huggable and frequently maligned aquatic inhabitant: the eel-like Pacific lamprey.
Sometimes called the “river eel,” the Pacific lamprey seems more sci-fi monster or Lovecraftian horror than a denizen of a Holocene ecosystem.
They’re primitive in form, lacking the fins, scales and gills of true fish. In fact, they look pretty much the same today as they did when they first appeared in the fossil record some 450 million years ago.
Fitting their old-school ways, adult lampreys also lack jaws, instead using sucker-like mouths to attach to larger fish and even whales. They do this to both hitch a ride and to feed, leech-like, on the blood of their would-be transports.
Their prehistoric biology and parasitic behavior have made the Columbia’s “forgotten fish” a hated “trash fish” in the eyes of many.
But lampreys are an important food for many animals and are considered a First Food by multiple Pacific Northwest Tribes, including the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe.
These four sovereign nations make up the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), a tribal organization that seeks to protect and restore salmon, sturgeon and lamprey populations in the Columbia River Basin and one of the sponsors of Lampreypalooza.
Overcoming the lamprey’s perceived otherworldliness is one reason for the public portion of Lampreypalooza, which later in the day includes a film and talk highlighting the importance of the fish to CRITFC Tribes.
At the insider-only morning tour at Bonneville Dam, no one needs to be convinced to love lamprey. The crowd is made up of lamprey aficionados, many of them scientists from the state, federal and tribal agencies working together to protect the fish.
The tour is about highlighting recent work to help lamprey migrate past Bonneville and other nearby dams that has been brought about thanks to this combined effort.
But while engineers and scientists work to build specialized lamprey passages, the fish face challenges not only from the dams that block their path but from an uncertain political environment in which funding and support for the Columbia River Basin’s most misunderstood fish could dry up.
Engineering lamprey passages
Like salmon, lampreys are anadromous. They start their lives in freshwater before heading out to sea, only to return years later as spawning adults.
Like salmon, lampreys don’t eat once they return to the Columbia River, instead living off their fat reserves. Like salmon, their upriver migration is obstructed by dams.
Also like salmon, lamprey numbers have been in decline since dams were installed on the Columbia and its tributaries.
But while regional dams, including Bonneville, have had fish passages for decades, only recently have passages specifically designed for lamprey been added.
“Their swimming style is completely different than salmon,” says Jake Macdonald, project lead on lamprey passage for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Rather than “swimming” in a conventional sense, lamprey travel using a method called “burst and attach.”
Much like a spring uncoiling, the animals jump or burst forward—as far as 10 feet at a time. Then they use their sucker-like mouths to attach to a smooth surface to keep from being dragged back downriver by the current.
It’s at the attach end of their locomotion that they face their first obstacle to migration: right angles.
“The problem is when the [Army] Corps pours [concrete], they make 90-degree angles,” says Tod Sween, fisheries biologist and lamprey project lead for the Nez Perce Tribe. “When [lampreys are] climbing up, they hit that 90-degree angle, and they fall off.”
Because suckers don’t work well on right angles, Macdonald and his team have rounded the surfaces inside most of Bonneville’s fish passages, and his team is working on doing the same for The Dalles and John Day dams.
Another complication to lampreys’ “burst and attach” strategy is that the animals typically can’t sustain constant swimming.
“Lamprey are poor swimmers compared to salmonids and most other native fish,” says Joe Skalicky, fish biologist and lamprey passage lead for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Skalicky says an adult lamprey swims at half the speed of a returning adult salmonid.
While salmon generally swim in steady currents high in the water column, lampreys prefer to stick to the bottom and edges of channels where the currents are weaker. Fish passages designed for salmon don’t account for this.
As a result, Skalicky says water flowing through many fish passages is too fast for most lampreys.
Macdonald and his team have found several ways to engineer around this.
One strategy is simply to drill lamprey-sized holes where needed. A more complicated strategy is to selectively slow the flow of water in sections of the dam, something Macdonald and his team recently did at Bonneville Dam.
Lampreys, as it happens, also need to rest between bursting and attaching.
To accommodate this biological quirk, Macdonald and his team have added “refuge boxes” or “rest boxes” every 10 vertical feet in some areas to allow lampreys to recoup.
The boxes are found underwater inside several of Bonneville’s “Lamprey Passage Structures,” or LPSs. Macdonald describes these as “Chutes and Ladders-like” structures. The description is apt.
I see an LPS on the Washington side of the dam near a salmon fish ladder not far from the visitor center.
The structure’s base looks like boxy ventilation ducting. The “ducting” steadily climbs the side of the dam before running into a long metal pipe that sits astride several metal footings connected to a wall of the dam. An osprey sits on the wall under this lamprey monorail, oblivious to the food traveling unseen over its head.
Laurie Porter, fish biologist and lamprey project lead for CRITFC, explains to me how it works.
“The LPS bypasses the salmon ladder,” says Porter. “The lamprey are able to go through the LPS using their suction mouth. It takes them all the way to the end and drops them off to where they can continue upstream above the dam.”
How many more LPSs will be added to other regional dams will depend on funding, which is becoming uncertain.
Protecting lamprey in the age of Trump
Securing funding for lamprey passages has been difficult because, unlike salmon, lampreys aren’t protected under the Endangered Species Act.
In 2004, the Pacific lamprey was considered for ESA protections. Despite clear evidence that lamprey numbers were declining, however, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined the fish didn’t qualify for federal protection.
Christina Wang, retired fish biologist at the USFWS and former deputy project leader of the Columbia River Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, says the reason lamprey failed to qualify had less to do with the need to protect lamprey than with how the Endangered Species Act works.
“The Endangered Species Act really works well for distinct populations and not range-wide populations,” says Wang. “Lamprey didn’t fit nicely into endangered species protections because it’s hard to parse out the species’ range.”
The Pacific lamprey is native to the northern Pacific Ocean. Its range stretches from Hokkaido Island in Japan to Baja California.
Like salmon, lampreys return to freshwater to spawn. But unlike salmon they don’t always return to the same freshwater.
In fact, Wang says, it’s now known that although a particular lamprey might start its life in a particular part of the Columbia River Basin—living as a bottom-dwelling filter feeder for as long as 17 years—that doesn’t mean that lamprey is likely to return to the same part of the Basin as an adult or even to the Basin at all.
That’s a problem because the ESA was designed to protect specific, unique populations.
Salmon being specialists fit the ESA bill. Lamprey being generalists do not.
With ESA a no-go, those working to protect lamprey took a different path; they used the treaty rights of the CRITFC Tribes to ensure lamprey were protected.
Under their individual treaties with the federal government, the Tribes have legally protected access to the fish they harvested when their treaties were signed. The federal government likewise has a legal obligation to ensure those fish are around to be caught.
These treaty obligations and the leverage they provide the Tribes led in 2008 to the signing of the Columbia Basin Fish Accords, an agreement between three of the four CRITFC Tribes and several federal agencies, including the Corps of Engineers.
The Columbia Basin Fish Accords, which were later expanded to include additional signatories, created opportunities for long-term funding and allowed for larger, more ambitious projects. While many of these focused on salmon, the tribal signatories to the Accords also made sure protections for lamprey were included.
The work to build lamprey passage at Bonneville and other lower river dams was a direct result of the Accords.
The Columbia Basin Fish Accords, however, expire this fall.
Originally intended for just 10 years, the Accords have received multiple extensions. This year, however, could be different.
Many see the Trump Administration’s recent move to withdraw from the Biden-area Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement as a sign that the Accords and the lamprey they help protect won’t get another extension.
Macdonald for one isn’t counting on the Accords being renewed.
He’s also not counting on federal funding for continued lamprey passages. He says the White House Office of Budget and Management has told his office that they plan to “zero out” all lamprey passage funding for the upcoming fiscal year.
Are the passages working?
One project that will continue to receive funding, according to Macdonald, is a study to determine if all the effort to build lamprey passages is in fact helping lampreys migrate.
To figure this out, Macdonald, Porter and others are working with researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The project uses tags inserted in adult lampreys to track the animals’ migration upriver. On our Lampreypalooza tour of Bonneville, we see this research in action.
At a base of the dam, CRITFC employees pull lampreys from traps and pass them through a wired wand and into a bucket. The wand reads the animals’ tags. Data from the tags will allow researchers to understand how many lampreys are migrating past the dam, which passage systems are working and which need improvements.
Numbers so far, however, suggest a lot more work needs to be done.
“At every dam you lose about half of the fish even with all of the improvements that have been done,” says Porter.
The problem for the CRITFC Tribes, says Porter, is that the further upriver the Tribe is the less likely that Tribe is to see lamprey.
The most extreme case is the Nez Perce Tribe.
By the time lampreys get to Nez Perce country at the Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River, in eastern Washington, the fish have had to traverse eight dams, and at each of the eight dams they’ve lost half their numbers. As a result, the number of lamprey counted at Lower Granite are just a trickle of the numbers counted at Bonneville.
Using the latest counts from just two days before I visited the dam, Porter tells me that while the number of lamprey counted at Bonneville was over 51,000, the number of lamprey counted at Lower Granite was just 14.
This is why the Tribes of CRITFC since the early 2000s haven’t waited for more lamprey passage to be installed to have access to their critical first food.
Instead, they’ve been trapping and collecting lamprey at Bonneville, The Dalles and John Day dams and trucking the fish further upriver.
“If it weren’t for the trucks and these translocations, moving them from these lower three dams up past Lower Granite, they would’ve basically gone extinct [above the dam]” says Sween.
Jill-Marie Gavin, public information specialist for CRITFC and member of the Umatilla Tribe, says her organization’s transportation effort has been successful enough that the Umatilla recently started to ceremonially harvest lampreys, something that hadn’t occurred since the 1960s.
Gavin sys lampreys are not only a First Food to the Tribes of CRITFC, they’re also a delicacy.
“As someone who cooks in the longhouse, when we do have our eels on the table, it’s considered something very special and we’re extraordinarily thankful for because it’s just so rare nowadays,” says Gavin.
Learning to love lamprey
To see the transportation effort in practice, late in the afternoon I visit with Vernon Smartlowit, CRITFC fishery technician and member of the Yakama Nation, at the hatchery on the Oregon side of the Columbia River.
Inside a large room lit by fluorescent lights, Smartlowit oversees several backyard-pool-sized tanks filled with lampreys caught by CRITFC staff earlier in the day.
This is only a temporary home. Later the lamprey will be trucked further upriver to the Tribes that make up CRITFC.
Smartlowit’s job, as he describes it, is to make sure each Tribe gets its fair amount.
Today, he’s also playing another role: lamprey ambassador.
As part of Lampreypalooza, Smartlowit is introducing the creature from Earth’s deep time to interested tourists who have wandered into the hatchery. He scoops the creatures up in a net before gently handling them with white, fabric gloves and presenting them to the small, gathered crowd of the curious.
To the willing, he hands a pair of gloves and the opportunity to handle the fish themselves. Most give the animals a look and turn him down.
Smartlowit says there’s still a lot of misinformation about lamprey. Among other things, he says, people sometimes think lamprey are a predatory, invasive species in the Columbia River.
His job, he says, is to teach people these are “the good fish.”
“We value this fish, like all the animals and all the roots and everything,” says Smartlowit. “These are our ancestors. I’m here just trying to provide for the next generation. … Like the salmon, we want to sustain them for everyone, native and nonnative.”