Sea lamprey unwelcome guest on fishing excursion
WILSON, N.Y. — When an angler drops hook and bait into water, he or she can’t be certain what will return. Often the retrieve brings the hook and nibbled bait, or just the hook.
Regularly enough to keep things interesting, however, something sleek, wild and stupendous shows up — a walleye, a bass, a catfish, even a powerhouse salmon or a steelhead.
On exceptional occasions, something distinctive appears.
In recent days, a Lake Ontario king salmon — large, strong and lively — latched onto a flasher-and-fly combination at about 60 feet down. And latching onto the side of the king was a sea lamprey that released its death grip only after its host was embraced by a net and swung on deck.
The slender, 14-inch parasite provided a slithering, though repellant, thrill as it twisted and rolled in efforts to escape.
Granted, a curling sea lamprey isn’t as disquieting as the sight of a cloud wall heading across open water, but its grotesqueness can be startling even on the Great Lakes.
Lampreys, native to Atlantic coastal waters, apparently slinked their way into Lake Ontario soon after the completion of the Erie Canal, about 190 years ago.
In 1921, they were found in Lake Erie after making their way through the Welland Canal. Within two decades, sea lampreys became a scourge of the upper Great Lakes by killing millions of coldwater fish, including virtually the entire lake trout population of Lake Erie.
A lamprey, which can grow to 26 inches in the lakes and larger in the ocean, kills an estimated 39 pounds of fish during its lifetime, according to a U.s.canada report. Scarred ocean fish don’t usually die from a lamprey attack, though an estimated six out of seven freshwater victims do.
The sea lamprey, whose lineage dates beyond the age of dinosaurs, is equipped with an efficient tool for extraction and slow execution. Its jawless mouth is shaped something like a bathroom plunger, though filled with circular rows of rasping teeth with which lampreys scrape into fish flesh and feed on bodily fluids for as few as 38 hours to as many as 220.
Mouth aside, the sea lamprey resembles an eel, though its scaleless length and slimy skin don’t project the fins of more evolved fishes. Instead of gill slits, the lamprey has a line of small round holes along its side that suggest the stylish portholes on some old Buicks.
Held with more finesse than one grasps a copperhead snake, the Ontario lamprey tried to reach up for a holding hand before latching onto a boat seat, gripping like the sucking nozzle on a vacuum cleaner.
Figuring that turning loose such a creature was offering it an invitation to attack more fish, two geezer fishermen watched a slightly younger fisherman stomp the lamprey’s head.
The lifeless lamprey was tossed overboard and slowly vanished into 200 feet of water, perhaps intercepted on descent by a feeding salmon, but probably not.
The king salmon went to the cooler. There, after escaping slow demise by lamprey, it perished in a few minutes resting on a bier of ice. In a few more hours the king would become frozen fillets shared by three predatory omnivores.
And so life at the top of this slender food chain, a repulsive and beautiful affair, went on.
outdoors@dispatch.com