Monday June 23, 2025
The Alpena News —
For 25 years I was a fisheries biologist at the DNR’s Lake Huron Research Station in Alpena. One of our many projects was netting lake trout to assess their health each year. To see the fish coming aboard gives the first inkling of what the survey year will tell.
I remember in the early 1990s finding important evidence of lake trout recovery: wild lake trout spawning on a reef in Thunder Bay. We were excited to see this first evidence of reproduction but when I hefted one nice female lake trout most of her eggs flowed out of lamprey holes in her side. That fish set the tone of the next several years: lamprey wounding rose despite the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s and their partner agencies’ best efforts at sea lamprey control. There was a large, uncontrolled population of sea lampreys in the St. Marys River, the huge tributary through which Lake Superior drains into Lake Huron.
The Great Lakes Fishery Commission, together with Michigan DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Environment Canada, and the USGS Hammond Bay Biological Station found that source and devised the prescription.
Hammond Bay Biological Station led the mapping of St. Marys “lamprey hot spots” and an interagency team plotted our attack. The treatment, which would cost nearly $5 million, was successful. But sea lamprey suppression is forever. Treatments of the St. Marys River and dozens of other tributaries to Lake Huron will need to be carried out every year without interruption. Failure to do so would be more dead lake trout, the potential loss of multibillion-dollar fishery for Michigan, and possibly the fouling of our beaches, such as what happened in the 1960s.