Tribal Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan updated by tribes, CRITFC 

Columbia River tribes work with CRITFC to release comprehensive update to groundbreaking conservation effort as climate change and habitat loss threaten cultural cornerstone

PORTLAND, Ore. – Thirty years ago, most Pacific Northwesterners, the federal government, and even scientists knew little about the Pacific lamprey. If they did know about them, more often than not, they considered them unimportant or even unwanted, going so far as to conduct intentional poisonings of lamprey

It was tribal elders who started ringing the alarms about this culturally significant fish experiencing a drastic and rapid decline.

These alarms  drove tribal natural resource programs into motion, laid the groundwork to build partnerships with state and federal resource managers, and started a focused and thorough collection of data surrounding Pacific lamprey and what would be required to help protect and restore these ancient fish. That cultural, habitat and genetic data collection brought about the first Tribal Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan back in 2011. Guided by this plan, tribal, state and federal managers have worked to help reverse the decline of Pacific lamprey throughout the Columbia Basin. As they went about this work, they added more knowledge, research and policy improvements along the way. Now, 14 years after the first release, a new, more in-depth plan has been published.

The updated Tribal Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan (TPLRP), finalized this spring after four years of development, is a scientific roadmap and meant to serve as a demonstration of Indigenous leadership in restoration and conservation and a blueprint for restoring cultural as well as ecological relationships.

The plan’s structure has also evolved to meet different audiences’ needs. “In this plan we consider moving us toward those goals’ vision and how those goals may be a bit different in 2011 compared to 2025,” Laurie Porter (Lac Courte Oreilles [Ojibwe]), CRITFC’s lamprey lead notes. The updated version includes both a technical document for scientists and managers, and a policy brief for decision-makers.

“The technical document is directed to the scientists and students, anyone who is interested in learning more about the species. The policy brief, or document, is for our policy folks to take to DC and have at meetings advocating for lamprey,” Porter explains.

Porter emphasizes the new plan’s accessibility and emotional impact. “Filled with quotes, photos, and tables, the publication is useful, but also accessible for everyone. Just start with the quotes and it will have an impact on you because it’s a very powerful document.”

“Lamprey have been an important part of the cultures, diets, and ceremonies of Columbia Basin tribes since time immemorial,” said Aja DeCoteau, Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) executive director. “The tribes have been successfully leading the effort to restore this threatened fish throughout the Columbia River Basin, not only to protect its role in the ecosystem, but also to preserve our access to this important First Food.

From cultural knowledge to scientific action

CRITFC worked closely with its member tribes in creating the first TPLRP. The plan development was jumpstarted with data, science and technical knowledge the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) had been gathering for more than two decades at that point. It had also been gathering oral histories from elders to document where lamprey were harvested and to determine run size estimates.

“Our elders would say ‘I had a 10-sack night,’ which meant a harvesting night of collecting 10 gunnysacks that fit 100-150 [lamprey] each,” Aaron Jackson (Umatilla), CTUIR Pacific Lamprey project leader, recalls. “It’s been decades since those kinds of numbers have been available.”

Those days of abundance are a distant memory. But after nearly 15 years of restoration work guided by the region’s first comprehensive Pacific lamprey plan, new science, climate change impacts, and increased urgency have all been documented and inserted into this new plan.

Jackson has worked as CTUIR’s Pacific Lamprey Project leader for the last couple of decades, leading efforts to restore Pacific lamprey back to the tribe’s ceded areas. His work began in the early 1990s when tribal members first noticed the species’ decline.

“When we first started this program, no one knew anything about lamprey when tribal members noticed their decline and called for action. Those words fell on deaf ears of managers,” Jackson explains. Despite the initial lack of interest from federal agencies, CTUIR pressed forward with the first lamprey restoration efforts in the Columbia Basin.

Its approach was at the time experimental: collect adult lamprey from mainstem Columbia River dams and release them past the mainstem dams into tributaries like the Umatilla River where traditional knowledge indicated good spawning and rearing habitat existed. Starting in 2000, this translocation program began showing remarkable results.

“Since1994, we’re seeing the population increase. In the Umatilla River, numbers are showing up much higher with years showing the counts up to 4,800 coming over Three Mile Dam, it’s unbelievable… to see we finally made it,” Jackson says.

For Columbia Plateau tribal communities, lamprey represent far more than just another fish species. They are one of the First Foods—sacred species that tribal members are culturally and spiritually obligated to protect as taught by the Washat religion.

“Lamprey are cherished fish and an important food source for the tribes. Tribes want to see them continue to be protected. As one of our foods, if they’re in trouble the whole circle is broken and in trouble,” Jackson explains.

Regional collaboration and scientific breakthroughs

The success of CTUIR’s early restoration work helped drive the development of the region’s first comprehensive Pacific Lamprey Tribal Restoration Plan in 2011. The plan represented unprecedented collaboration between the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce, and Warm Springs tribes— the four Columbia River tribes with treaty-reserved rights to harvest lamprey throughout their usual and accustomed areas.

“The 2011 plan led the way in how lamprey restoration was developed by tribes. In 1995 Umatilla was the first tribe in the region developing programs and management efforts for lamprey,” says Porter, who started as CRITFC’s lamprey biologist and project lead in 2015.

Since then, each tribe has developed sophisticated lamprey programs, contributing unique research approaches and findings. Ralph Lampman, who leads the Yakama Nation’s lamprey program after starting as a research biologist in 2012, has brought international perspectives to the work.

“We had the First International Forum on the Recovery and Propagation of Lamprey back in 2011,” Lampman explains. His program has collaborated with researchers in Japan and Europe who have extensive experience with lamprey artificial propagation and has also pioneered the use of environmental DNA techniques to study lamprey predation.

The scientific advances over the past 15 years have been dramatic. New acoustic tagging technology has begun revealing the mysteries of juvenile lamprey migration—previously “a black box” in terms of survival rates and timing to reach the ocean.

“Now we have an acoustic tag and currently, we have three years of data looking at their survival in the mainstem,” Lampman says.

Climate change and continued sense of urgency

The 2025 plan update reflects both scientific advances and growing concerns about climate change impacts on lamprey populations and habitat.

“It was time to update it as there’s been a lot more science and we’ve learned a lot more climate change-related shifts are taking place. We’re not moving fast enough on the timeline and it’s necessary; there’s a sense of urgency,” Porter explains. “That’s the word that comes up often—it’s ‘urgent,’ therefore we need to have more accountability from all of us.”

The updated plan expands beyond simple population recovery to address contamination issues that threaten the cultural goal of restoring harvest.

“We have expanded our scope, not only have self-sustaining harvestable lamprey, but also to have lamprey free of contamination. If the food isn’t safe to eat, it isn’t honoring trust and treaty responsibility,” Porter says.

New research has revealed concerning levels of mercury and PCBs in lamprey tissue, leading to health consumption advisories.

“All populations, both vulnerable or not, currently have an advisory to consume them in the quantities that are healthy,” Porter explains.

“The tribes believe that the long-term solution to this problem isn’t keeping people from eating contaminated fish—it’s keeping fish from being contaminated in the first place,” commented DeCoteau.

Funding challenges and federal responsibility

One of the updated plan’s key focuses is demanding greater accountability from federal partners and securing reliable funding for restoration work. The tribes estimate comprehensive lamprey restoration will require $150-200 million across the Columbia Basin.

The lamprey funding the tribes and other partners have access to is limited and increasingly uncertain.

“Currently we don’t have a funding source we can depend upon for larger projects year by year,” Porter says.

The funding challenge is particularly acute given lamprey’s complex life cycle. “Their lifespan is up to 20 years. We’re looking for reliable, long-term, sustained funding for lamprey and restoration,” Porter emphasizes.

The tribes argue that federal treaty obligations require treating lamprey restoration with the same priority as ESA-listed salmon recovery efforts.

“We want lamprey given the same value as an ESA-listed species,” Porter explains. “They have the same value and should be treated the same. Right now they’re often competing with salmon and we don’t want to compete, we want to bring them together and walk side by side. They each deserve their own space in attention and funds. There is a treaty and trust responsibility for maintaining harvestable and self-sustaining populations.”

Major infrastructure improvements at Columbia River mainstem dams remain the single biggest need. “Adult mainstem passage is the number one limiting factor. We have started working to identify fixes and improvements to put in at the mainstem dams,” said Jackson. “There’s still a lot of things to be done, in the mainstem environment alone – $150-200 million is needed to hit the ground running with lamprey.”

Cultural restoration and transfer of TEK

Returning lamprey to harvestable numbers is only part of the restoration goal. The updated plan also emphasizes the restoration and promotion of the cultural connection the region’s tribes have to this traditional food.

“All this work is for future generations,” shares Porter. “Elders have provided so much Traditional Ecological Knowledge [TEK] for this
plan. The passing of knowledge from elders to youth and learning the cultural practices that had been lost in some places.”

“That was one of the first things that we did with this project,” adds Jackson. “We conducted TEK surveys with tribal elders, asking them about everything they knew about lamprey like what time of year they would harvest them, where they would find them, how many they would see at any given site, those kind of things.”

“We need to bring back healthy numbers and populations to the watershed, that’s true, but also need to bring back the harvest,” emphasized Lampman “That’s the start of the completion of the restoration.”

The cultural focus also drives public education efforts to counter persistent misconceptions about lamprey. “That’s a lot of what we’re trying to fight off—the misconception that they are invasive. People think about lamprey as non-charismatic; they think ‘why would I want that fish here that looks like a snake or a vampire?’,” Jackson says. “We need to help people grow this fondness and really care about lamprey because they’re a really important species.”

Restoration success and hope looking forward

Despite the challenges, restoration efforts have achieved remarkable successes that offer hope for the future. The Umatilla River program has led to the return of ceremonial harvest after decades without lamprey in traditional harvest areas.

“We have had a ceremonial harvest at home and that’s huge, that hasn’t been done in decades,” Jackson says. The harvest season “starts in May and goes to the end of June” and represents a milestone in both biological and cultural restoration.

The Yakama Nation is approaching similar achievements. “This year we had a record number of lamprey. We estimate that three to four thousand lamprey are now passing Prosser Dam in Lower Yakima River. I think we’re at a level where we can start talking about a small-scale ceremonial harvest,” Lampman says.

Tribal lamprey programs have translocated over 70,000 adult lamprey in the last 25 years. Lamprey are collected at mainstem Columbia River dams and released into the interior CRB in tribes’ homelands. CRITFC collected a record 17,000 fish in 2025 from the mainstem dams for the tribal translocation programs.

Working together

The relationships, cooperation, and coordination that the lamprey restoration work has built is a model of intertribal collaboration that could inform other conservation efforts. “In the lamprey world, the four treaty tribes have been working really well together,” Jackson observes. “It’s a good showcase, all of us coming together with one focused effort to protect a species neglected for a number of years.”

That collaboration extends beyond tribal boundaries, recognizing that lamprey populations are interconnected across vast geographic ranges. “These lamprey don’t return to their birth stream like salmon do,” explains Lampman. “Lamprey born in Yakama lands might end up in Japan or Russia. We’re all connected as one big population and all of us have to restore them together.”

For the tribes, the restoration represents a reciprocal relationship between people and fish that defines successful conservation. “It’s reciprocal, we care for them and they care for us.” Ultimately, the plan’s goal is to realize its vision: Pacific lamprey are widely distributed in the CRB and throughout their entire range in healthy, self-sustaining, harvestable numbers that fully provide for tribal traditional, cultural, ceremonial, and spiritual uses. Lamprey are safe for consumption in large quantities by all members of the community and provide important ecological services to habitats where they reside for the entirety of their lifecycle.