GORE BAY—Representatives of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, on both sides of the border are expressing relief that the Great Lakes sea lamprey control program will continue.
“The Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) has indicated it will put the money forward to continue the sea lamprey (lampricide) control program for all the Canadian portion of the lakes in the Great Lakes and for the US section of Lake Ontario,” stated George Purvis, a local commercial fishing operator and member of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC), last week.
A day after Mr. Purvis’s positive news last week, Interlochen Public Radio (based in the US) reported on March 26 that the US sea lamprey control program has received approval to rehire three dozen federal employees in the Great Lakes Sea lamprey control program to combat the invasive fish species. This comes after staffing cuts and hiring freezes had been announced by the new US federal government administration in February, threatening the sea lamprey control program, something the GLFC said would have led to more than $200 million in lost fishing potential.
The GLFC is a Canadian-American commission which coordinates lamprey control across the Great Lakes region.
Each year, the commission contracts workers with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to set traps and apply lampricide in rivers, stopping lamprey before they enter the Great Lakes.
However, as had been reported by the Expositor March 12, the Donald Trump administration had indicated the firing of probationary workers and a freeze on season hiring jeopardized the program’s operation, which typically runs for April to October.
Greg McClinchey, director of policy and legislative affairs for the GLFC told Interlochen the organization now has permission to hire back all those workers, 12 probationary and 25 seasonal employees. “It’s good news,” he said. There is positive momentum there. We’re five or six weeks behind schedule, but everybody’s working hard to see if we can’t get things as much back on track as possible.”
Mr. McClinchey indicated it’s still unclear how many of those workers will actually choose to return. He said some may have already taken other jobs and training new workers takes time, which could set things back even more.
“We’re still in the process of assessing what, if any, impact (the delays) will be,” Mr. McClinchey told Interlochen. “Even if 100 percent of the staff came back, the impact will be a delay in the start. The hope is still very much that we will commence as early as possible. The plan is to model the program as closely as we can after what we have done traditionally.”
With the previously announced job cuts made in the United States Great Lakes invasive species program, Mr. Purvis had said at the time that it may have led to the fishery ending up being wiped out by sea lamprey as was the case about 80-90 years ago.
“The fishery in the Great Lakes is worth $7 billion (in America and Canada),” Mr. Purvis told The Expositor previously. He explained they were first sighted in the area around 1934. Ten years later, by 1945, lake trout were all gone on the Great Lakes because of sea lamprey.
He explained over 5,200 lampricide tests were conducted over about 30 years before one was found that works on killing sea lamprey while not harming any other species of fish.
In the 1950s, the commission was tasked with controlling the species, after piece-meal efforts by Canada, the US and individual states and provinces failed. The program of treating streams with lampricide, kills about eight or nine million lamprey a year.
