Sea lampreys ruined many a picnic

By Helen Westie
Sun contributor
When I was growing up in the 1930’s in southern Michigan, our family summer highlight was always a camping trip. Our favorite camp spot was the state park on Green Lake in Interlochen. It was an idyllic camp spot under stately pines near the beach and the shelter house. The Interlochen music camp had been in existence for just a few years. Dr. Joe Maddy of the School of Music at the University of Michigan and founder of the Music Camp would often come to our camp site and give us free passes to the concert that night. Many years later when I was a student at the University, I met Dr. Maddy at a reception in the School of Music. I asked him if he remembered giving us the passes to concerts. “I certainly do,” he replied. “We really needed audiences in those days.”
I recall how much we enjoyed the International Youth Orchestra which often played familiar classics as we sat in the original Interlochen Bowl. I admired the camp uniforms which consisted of Navy blue corduroy knickers, blue shirts and red sweaters, which are standard issue to this day. Red mittens were part of the regulation uniform and they were needed in July and August here in the north country. Of course, as students played their instruments, those had to be put aside.

The nights were very cold in the 30’s and 40’s, and those campers who were better equipped (some even had mobile campers) would often Good Morning us with “Nice sleeping last night!”. “Humpf” would be our reply, “We froze”.
We always camped at the same place. Later, after I married and had two boys, my husband’s work took us to the Philadelphia area, but July or August took us back to camp at Interlochen. My brother Charles’ family would camp near us. My sons loved being with their cousins. Lately, they recalled the strains of Liszt’s Les Preludes, which always marked the end of the summer camp season as it still does today.
Through the years, my parents who still lived near Detroit would come to visit us at camp. The rigors of tenting did not appeal to them, so they rented a cabin nearby. Mom would bring her large cast-iron frying pan, some lemon, butter, Crisco, and perhaps a few spices. The most delectable of Michigan fish, the Lake Superior lake trout, would be bought in Traverse City. Mom would pan-fry the trout steaks and would serve corn on the cob and sliced very ripe tomatoes with it. Sometimes there were little new potatoes buttered and parslied. Dessert was a bowl of berries. What delicious dinners Mom prepared for us year after year. Then one year the lake trout became prohibitively expensive and the next one it was not available at all. That scourge of the Great Lakes, the sea lamprey, had decimated the whole industry!
I have never seen a sea lamprey, but from bulletins of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Service, I can visualize this reprehensible, disgusting sea animal. It is snake-like and it has a protuberant sucker-like strong mouth and teeth which can penetrate the tough skin and scales of any big fish. This parasite bores a hole in the side of the host fish and lives on its blood and body fluids, and the host fish usually dies.
The habitat of the sea lamprey is the Atlantic Ocean and not the Great Lakes. With the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaways some lampreys came in with ocean liners. Niagara Falls provided a barrier, but then with the opening of the Welland Canal in 1919, the lampreys gradually increased so that they have killed off the lake trout and other large fish.
In the 1940’s and 50’s the United States government spent millions of dollars in research programs to control the lamprey. Cooperation with Canada and much study has gone into programs to eliminate this predator. Various mechanical barriers were invented. An effective one was an electric fence, which did not allow lampreys to enter but did allow other fish to go through. This was put across streams where the lampreys go to spawn and which feed into the big lakes. In recent years, two lampricides have been developed which can attack the lamprey larval stage. At last, because of the application of these lampricides, the lamprey population has gone down and the lake trout is increasingly more available as time goes on.
Tom Rose of Empire is an avid fisherman and reports that now and then a Lake Michigan fisherman will reel in a lamprey on a salmon/ The fisherman will immediately take the lamprey in to the DNR office for whatever use this will be in the solving of the lamprey problem.
Steve Yancho, chief of Natural Resources for the Department of the Interior, whose office is in the National Park headquarters in Empire, and Dennis Lavis of the Fish and Wildlife Services in Ludington have provided helpful documents about the sea and lamprey problem and the steps in its solution. These documents are now on file in the Glen Lake Community Library in Empire. David Diller, librarian, has placed these in the records room for public use.