In 1955, U.S. and Canadian officials established the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, a bilateral treaty organization dedicated to eradicating what is often called the “vampire fish.” Since then, the sea lamprey population has declined by more than ninety percent, thanks to annual treatments and ongoing research. Control of the species has saved the region's fishing industry, which now generates six billion dollars a year.
Peel back the curtain on even the most natural landscapes and government initiatives often emerge, quietly keeping business as usual. But for many government programs, success can bring problems of its own. “If no one really knows about the threat, it makes it harder in tough times to say, ‘Hey, we need this money,’” Ethan Baker, chairman of GLFC, told me.
Earlier this year, in what many federal employees came to call the Valentine's Day Massacre, the lamprey control program was unceremoniously gutted by the newly formed organization. Department of State Efficiency. Twelve probationary employees, some of whom were long-serving employees who had recently moved to new positions, were fired. Facing an uncertain future, other longtime employees took the buyout. The roughly twenty-five seasonal workers who form the backbone of annual enforcement efforts have been unable to be recruited due to Trump's government-wide hiring freeze. Spending on federal credit cards was capped at the dollar, making it impossible to book travel to and from treatment sites.
The commission, which itself is not a government agency but an international organization that contracts with federal employees in the United States and Canada, reached out to local congressional representatives. Residents too. In 2020 and 2021, when COVID-19In an era of travel restrictions, treatments have declined and lamprey populations have exploded. In Lake Ontario, treatment stopped completely for one year, and lamprey numbers increased tenfold.
The lamprey program was eventually released from DOJ reductions and staff additions are allowed. But critical treatments were delayed, and early-season assessments, which ironically make efforts more effective by pinpointing where to treat, had to be cut. Across the country, many such programs and the research they depend on are being drained as billions of dollars in federal funds are stolen.
Of the more than five thousand tributaries that flow into the Great Lakes, about one in ten are infested with lampreys. Every year, crews handle about a quarter of emergency flows. The Manistique River system in Upper Michigan, some three hundred miles long, is home to the largest virus deployment this year. During the two-week cleanup, crews killed about a million lamprey larvae there at a cost of $1.4 million. (In total, the program costs about twenty million dollars a year.)
To determine where to treat, federal workers must first find out where the lampreys are. They walk along the shallow banks of tributaries where lampreys live and breed before heading out to the lakes to hunt, and shake the bottom with hand-held electric oars. If there are lampreys there, they will come out of their dirty holes. Workers must then expose the ecosystem to a specific concentration of poison, ideally designed to kill lampreys and a few other fish, for nine continuous hours. Cleanup specialists create a unique model for each river, adjusting for seemingly unimportant variables like the addition of a new beaver dam that can completely change flows. “We got lucky this time,” Laurie Krieger, the fish biologist overseeing the treatment, told me. “It rained right before we got here, not while we were being treated.”
The lamprey control program is the world's sole purchaser of 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol, also known as TFM, or simply lampricide, which was discovered in 1956 in a research laboratory on the northern tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. As the lamprey crisis worsened, various chemical companies sent compounds to the lab, which sought a cure-all. “They would receive the chemical, sometimes in a plain brown envelope from the Department of Defense or something like, 'Here, try this,'” Mark Gaden, executive secretary of the GLFC, told me. The research team conducted “brine jar” tests: they left lampreys, local fish and a chemical in the jar overnight. In the morning, they wrote down the result – usually something like “Dead trout, dead lamprey” or, sometimes, “Dead trout, live lamprey.”
