‘A lot of fun’: Yakama Nation biologists work with college students to pull lampreys from drying canal silt

The short side of the triangle is a 100-foot bridge over the canal with large drainage grates underneath to prevent debris from clogging the orchard irrigation systems downstream. The next side is the east bank of the canal, and the last is a roughly 500-foot Bureau of Reclamation screen that runs diagonally across the water to prevent young salmon from passing further into the canal.

Davy Lumley is the project biologist. Standing on the canal bank above a group of biologists and future biologists plucking lampreys from the sediment, she explained why so many fish end up there.

“The dam is upstream and it’s pushing all that water up here, but these screens keep the bigger fish from coming down (further into the canal) and also the debris,” she said. “Sediment in the water column slows down and settles here.”

This environment—slow water moving through organic-rich sediment—is ideal for lamprey larvae.

And it would be great if the young lampreys could return to the main stem of the Yakima River to then swim down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean for the next stage of their lives.

But it is not so. Instead, with the region’s irrigation season nearly over, a patch of perfect habitat was only days away from turning into a pile of dirt on the side of U.S. Highway 97. As Lumley explained the process of rescuing the lamprey, workers from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation brought out a small excavator that soon will excavate this part of the canal.

From the edge

Lampreys originate from the Columbia River, although they predate it by a couple of hundred million years. In fact, the nutrient-rich fish helped shape the river ecologically by supporting species like salmon.

Lamprey recovery efforts began in the 2000s after repeated counts of fish passage at Bonneville Dam found that their return had stopped.

Before the dams, lamprey biologists estimate profits in the millions. Over the past 25 years, returns have ranged from 6,200 to 63,000 counted per day at Bonneville Dam. (Day counts often cover about one-quarter of total revenue.)

The Yakama Nation’s recovery program began around 2008, joining the programs of other First Nations, including the Nez Perce, Warm Springs and Umatilla tribes, and the Columbia River Intertribal Fisheries Commission. Federal partners such as the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are funding much of the effort and working on their own projects, such as levee upgrades.

And in the years since the beginning, the Yakama Nation’s efforts have paid off: lampreys have returned to the Yakima Subbasin increased fivefold between the 2000s and 2010s. Following this success and other sub-programs such as the lamprey hatchery, the program recently expanded some of its efforts to southwest Washington, This was reported by The Columbian earlier this month.

An important stop

While rescues like last week’s are an important component of the recovery, Pacific Lamprey Project manager Ralph Lampman said they’re only a temporary measure.

“It’s not a long-term solution to just keep pulling fish out. What we need is a long-term solution that prevents fish from getting in and also from getting through the nets,” he said.

Because lamprey recovery is a relatively new field, much of what biologists do to achieve these long-term goals is improvised by the team through trial and error.

A former salmon biologist himself, Lampman believes that knowledge about lampreys and how to restore them is about where salmon recovery was in the 1950s or 60s. However, the team seems to be energized by the development of new technologies and methods, which are only further strengthened by their expertise the importance of fish for indigenous peoples and the ecology of the region.

Hands in the mud

But while the funding and political will to upgrade aging infrastructure materialize, the rescue efforts must continue — a reality that doesn’t seem to faze the team. Walking from the shore to the sediment, sometimes shin-deep, Lumley talked about the work they had done at the site since they arrived there last week.

“Since then we’ve had a group, at least one or two shockers every day,” she said. “The bank holds a lot of fish because there is a lot of good sediment. (When the water recedes) the fish come out and slowly swim down, but if it dries out too much, they run aground and dry out — or get picked up by predators.”

“Shockers,” also known as electrofishers, are a fish capture tool consisting of a Ghostbusters-style backpack that sends small electrical pulses into the water through two probes that look like lacrosse sticks. These pulses pull the young lamprey out of the sediment, allowing researchers to catch it.

In the far corner of the triangle, Lampman directed two environmental studies majors at Heritage University. One was electrofishing for the first time, while another spotted a fish and took an Ikea laundry basket to contain them.

“There’s two right here on the beach,” Heritage student Kayal Shoulderblade, 23, said. Lampman rushed forward in the mud, while 29-year-old Zachary Minthorn followed behind with a basket.

The day’s work was a compulsory laboratory for Heritage students. But both said the lab is their favorite of the year so far.

“That’s where I’m like, ‘Oh man, are we done yet? should we go OK. That’s how I feel about the fishing lab as a whole so far,” Minthorne said. “For me, it was the most interesting, the most interesting.”

Education for the future

This passion was visible in the students’ work. The focused trio—Shoulderblade on shockers, Minthorn as spotter and Lampman teaching and lunging—covered about one-third of the triangle that day.

Both Minthorne and Shoulderblade are members of the Yakama Nation who grew up on the reservation. While he’s most interested in the forest side of environmental research, Minthorn said it’s important for registered members to learn about traditional foods like lampreys.

“I used to joke, ‘Just like my ancestors,’ but that’s really how I feel when I’m hunting or fishing or doing anything like that,” he said. “Being able to do something like this to bring these things back so other people can experience lamprey or salmon or something like that is really important to me.”

Shoulderblade echoed his classmate, adding that it’s all about “what we can do to help the environment, not just the species.”

Above the canal, students crowded around a table covered with vials, model lampreys, and other objects.

“Here’s another one. “These are eggs,” said Lumley, holding up a small vial. Next, she showed the lamprey oil pills that Lampman had purchased in Japan, followed by a long, thin vial containing the lamprey’s “notochord,” its ancient equivalent of a spine.

The partnership between the private, nonprofit Heritage University in Toppenish and the Yakama Nation Restoration Project is two years in the making, but it’s not Pacific Lamprey Project’s only partnership. It also works with a number of other schools, including some high schools, Lampman said.

Recently, one of the students he worked with at a nearby high school reached out to him, now a student at the University of Washington.

“She wanted to do a lamprey project,” he said. “It’s great to see some of these students fishing and doing what we do — not even necessarily lampreys, but fishing in general.”