The Lamprey Eel & the South Fork of the Eel River.

Photos from Wikipedia

Just like every thing that I post here, I’m just as interested in the story that goes along with the plants and critters that I write about as the plants and critters themselves.

I was born and raised in the South Fork of the Eel Canyon, I have often mused that if the “scientists” want to know anything about this river or canyon, they should just ask me. Well, the other day one of those scientific types emailed me explaining that he was working with the local Indian tribe researching the Lamprey Eels on the north coast of California. I thought “Wow, finally”! All of my “knowledge” of the South Fork is going to come into play.

He said that he was interested in anything that I knew about the South Fork related to the eels. He said that folkloric evidence was okay, and layman terms was okay. He said that at the conclusion of the study that he would send all of the participants a copy of the final report. He went on to ask me what I knew about the “Ammocoetes” and the “macropthalmia”. Ummmm… I knew that an “ammocoetes was a hatchling eel, but I didn’t know what a “Macropthalmia” was. He asked about the baby eels before, and after, they grew their eyes. Whaaaa…. They get eyes later??? He asked about the “redds”. I knew that those were the spawning nests and as a little kid I watched the eels spawn and move big rocks with their mouths. I knew that the baby eels lived in the muck in the river bottom. I thought that they would go to the ocean in the fall of the year, just like the salmon and the steelheads do. I soon had to admit to myself that I was “not knowledgeable at all”.

I wrote him a nice email describing the changes that I’ve seen in the river through the years. About how we have lost all of the nice deep holes that were filled with real nice eel muck, and I thought that had a lot to do with the decline. That and that fact that we no longer had and deep, cold water pools, that we had before the two floods probably had a lot to do with the disappearance of the eels. I told him that any place that had a sandy / silty / mucky bottom had eels in the muck. I related that as kids we would scoop them up out of the muck with coffee cans, throw them on the river bank and put them in gallon jars full of water, so we could watch them. I told him about all of the dead eels tangled in the willow brush along the stream banks, and how we had to choose where we went swimming to avoid the dead eels that seemed to be everywhere. I offered my services to connect him with other people that had lived here before the eel pretty much disappeared. I offered to help on any surveys that I could help with.

Apparently my vast reservoir of knowledge and history about the river didn’t impress him that much. I didn’t hear back from him, and my hopes to be part of saving the Eel from oblivion slowly faded away. I was too embarrassed to try and re-contact him. So much with my expertise on the South Fork of the Eel River. I feel like a failure.

However, recently Ross Sherburn asked me to do a post on the Eels, so I decided that I would try to find out a little bit about them. As I researched them, I discovered that studying the Eel takes a more scientific approach than catching them in a coffee can and watching them try to bury themselves in the silt in the bottom of a glass jar. The Eel is a very intricate creature. First, as I’m sure you already guessed: “They are not really eels, you know. They are Lampreys”. That’s always a given, no matter what I call things, it’s always wrong. Lampreys are really a fresh water spawning fish, but they lack the jaws and fins of a true fish, so no matter what I would call them it would be wrong. About the only thing that you could call them that wouldn’t start and argument is “Pacific Lamprey”.

In the ocean, they survive by sucking onto a salmon, flat fish, pollock, or other kinds of fish. They have a round suction cup mouth with several rows of very sharp teeth around it. After they suck onto a fish they use their teeth to make the fish bleed and they suck the host fishes blood to live on.

After spending one to three years in the ocean, when they are 15-25 inches in length, they travel up a fresh water stream to spawn. They spawn from March to June, so if you want to see one, that is the time to observe them. It is unknown if they home in on the area that they were spawned, like salmon do. They seem to choose areas were there are lots of baby eels living in the muck. They spawn in the gravel at the upstream end of a riffle, similar to salmon. They move rocks to get down to the perfect size gravel for their eggs. The male sucks onto the female and wraps his body around the female, she is excited into laying her eggs and he is excited into spraying his sperm on the eggs. The eggs are fertile and settle into the loose bottom. They hatch after 19 days at 59 degree water temperature. They float downstream and bury themselves in the bottom muck, were they live for three to seven years! They live as filter feeders on diatoms and algae. After spawning the adults die. The river used to be quite smelly in the summer from all the dead eels.

They really don’t know much about their hatchling stage, (ammocoetes) were they live in the silt and muck. They think that they might actually move around in the muck. But, they know that they do move downstream and rebury themselves during periods of high water.

During their hatchling sub-muck stage they have no eyes. It’s only later that they grow eyes and teeth and swim out of the muck and move to the ocean. They actually Metamorphosis to macropthalmia, the juvenile stage, like a tadpole changes to a frog. Then they free swim to the ocean.

The habitat of the Pacific Lamprey is the northern Pacific rim, and the and the fresh streams found there.

How much of this did you know?

More reading:
http://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/Species/Data/PacificLamprey/Documents/012808PL-FactSheet.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamprey


The Lamprey Eel should not be confused with the Sacramento Sucker fish, that we have here, that was also once common.
Sacramento Sucker fish by Photo and text by Pat Higgens

The Sacramento sucker is the species found from Redwood Creek south, while the Klamath small scale sucker (Catostomas rimiculus) occurs in drainages from the Klamath River north. Suckers prefer the lazy current of mainstem coastal rivers to steep, tumbling headwater streams. The profound changes of north coast rivers in response to sedimentation from the 1955 and 1964 flood lead to a large increase in sucker populations companion with the decline of salmonids (German, 1968). In cases where there are chronic high levels of turbidity and bedload movement, suckers may decline or disappear, such as in the Gualala River (Higgins, 1997).


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