leech in the tn.

[fishmedic]

they sure are hard to filletemoScratch

 

[tennfisher]

Bubbakat - 2/12/2008 1:16 PM



Thanks for that I always thought they kinda looked like eels. Never really looked at them that closely though. I do know they are ugly looking things.

Your'e welcome Bubbakat. Sorry I jumped on that, my 40 years as a biology professor sort of leaps out every now and then in spite of myself. By the way, I understand that eel populations are steadily declining throughout the interior rivers of the U.S., apparently due to their inability to navigate through high lift locks and dams. They begin life in the Sargasso Sea and then migrate into freshwater. Recently the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering placing them on the Endangered Species List, but decided that it wasn't warrented. For additional info see:

http://www.fws.gov/northeast/ameel/

Incidentally, the lampreys that we find here attached to our fish from time to time are brook lampreys, quite a bit smaller than the sea lamprey that decimated the great lake fisheries some years ago after entering through the Erie Canal.
Tennfisher

 

[team-d]

There is still a pretty good "run" of sea lamprey in the Columbia river system. From what I've seen most of them are somewhere around 18-24" as adults - yes they are UGLY. You see one attached to a salmon/steelhead every now and then. You can smack the smallmouth swimming a 6" black curlytail worm on an 1/8 or 1/4 jig head at times, which looks similar to a juvenile lamprey. The sturgeon fisherman below Bonneville Dam use whole adult lamprey - some of those sturgeon down there are over 10 feet long and often come all the way out of the water when hooked. Anyway, that's interesting to see there are "river" lamprey around here, never heard of them...