Ancient fish, new markets
11-30-07
Tim Bodony (KIYU)

(photos courtesy of Kwikpak Fisheries)

A western Alaska fish buyer is trying to build a market for an ancient creature that might otherwise swim unnoticed at the bottom of icy rivers this time of year.

The lamprey is a boneless fish similar in appearance to an eel.  Millions of them enter the Yukon and other major rivers at this time of year to spawn. 

Once a common food item in Europe and America, the lamprey has all but disappeared from other parts of the world, where river dams have blocked their migration routes.

The most common type is the Arctic Lamprey, which like salmon are anadromous, returning in swarms to freshwater rivers to spawn and die.  Unlike salmon, lampreys are parasitic, attaching themselves to another fish or marine mammal to suck blood or other bodily fluids.  

After entering the Yukon River to spawn, they spread out to other tributaries or go as far as Canada.

Kwikpak Fisheries General Manager Jack Schultheis describes the life cycle of this creature as bizarre and primordial. 

Schultheis:      Their larvae hatches and remains in the river.  They sift their food through the mud – the actual larvae live in the mud, and they live like that for 7 years before they go back out to the ocean. When they are about 20 years old is when that age class comes back. 

People in Alaska have a long history of catching lamprey in the early winter for subsistence, making use of the creature’s high oil content; which can be as high as 40 percent of its mass.  That, along with the sheer volume of them that can be caught in a short time with simple gear, makes lamprey a popular choice for feeding dog teams in some villages. 

Commercially-caught lamprey might now end up on the menus of gourmet restaurants in France, as medicine, or as science experiments.  

Kwikpak is the commercial buyer and marketing arm of Yukon Delta Fisheries Development Association, the CDQ group representing 6 villages on the lower Yukon, including Grayling, where Kwikpak has a lamprey buying station set up.

The first experimental fishery was in 2003, when 50 thousand pounds were harvested in just 6 hours.  And this year, Kwikpak is trying to develop the fishery some more, shoring up domestic and foreign buyers for the unusual fish.

Schultheis says that there is a wide diversity of buyers for lamprey, from those that treat lamprey as a delicacy, to those that want to study them.

Schultheis:     We are dealing with people in southern France. We are dealing with some pharmaceutical companies on the equalities of lamprey oil, and that is a possibility. And there is another kind of a weird market, one that you wouldn’t think about.  Because they are such a prehistoric and been around so long there is a pretty fair demand for them in biological labs as something to use in classrooms, a specimen. 

There is not much of an Asian market for lamprey, according to Schultheis, because different varieties of eels are more popular for eating there.  Lamprey oil has some use in Chinese medicinals, but lampreys are also harvested on rivers in northern China.

Schultheis says that one of the main purposes of the experimental fishery is get a sense of the numbers it would take to make the lamprey fishery sustainable and profitable.  The question is whether enough fish can be harvested to build a strong market demand for them…

Schultheis:     And there apparently is with these lampreys.  The first thing you have to do is establish how much raw product is available, and then establish what it’s value is in the open market.  Fish and Game gave us a permit to harvest 40 thousand pounds of them. That is a big enough pile that you do something marketwise – although we wont harvest that much. We’ll probably only harvest 10 or 15 thousand pounds.

15 fishermen from lower Yukon villages got special freshwater commercial entry cards to participate in the fishery.  To catch the lamprey, fishermen cut holes in the river ice near the banks, and scoop the fish out with long-handled dipnets. 

A 2005 report from Fish and Game states that the size of the lamprey runs in Alaska are unknown, and calls for more research on their population structure, habitat needs, and their role as a salmon parasite. 

The sores that are visible on salmon are frequently caused by lampreys feeding on them. 

Click here for a close-up of lamprey caught on the Yukon (WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH)