Helping sea lamprey Friends of the Kennebec Salmon volunteer Douglas Watts helps a spawning sea lamprey ascend the ledges at the head of tide of Bond Brook in Augusta, Maine this June. FKS has found that many sea lampreys get stuck and die in the crevices of these ledges at Bond Brook while trying to ascend them. This year, FKS volunteers have helped dozens of sea lamprey safely reach their native spawning habitat in Bond Brook by creating a natural boulder fishway at the ledges and by carrying them over by hand. These actions will help ensure a healthy population of native sea lamprey in Bond Brook in the future. Late May and June marks the return of adult sea lamprey to their birthplace in the Kennebec River and its tributaries.
Sea lampreys are members of a very old family of fishes.
Their family contains many different species with many different habitats and life histories. The sea lamprey is the only member of the lamprey family native to Maine. It lives a long, complex and mysterious life that encompasses our freshwater streams and brooks, our rivers' broad main-stem and brackish estuaries as well as the open Atlantic ocean. At this stage, the lamprey has yet to develop eyes and stays buried a few inches below the streambed in fine sand and silt, where it feeds by filtering very small bits of organic material from the stream bed. Lamprey smolts born in streams far from the sea will sometimes begin to feed on other fish as they travel downstream in freshwater.