Back on the Genesee River

I returned to the Genesee River with help on Friday of last week (July 11 2014) and we had great success. We tagged another 250 lampreys before releasing them!

Here's a picture of Justin DiRado tagging one of our animals. The scale the animal is weighed on is in the foreground.

An up close pic of the syringe with the dye used to tag the lampreys. On the animal in the picture you can already see the orange line that was drawn first.

A fully anesthetized lamprey ready to be measured. At this point it is more of a wet noodle than a lamprey.

A close up of the oral cavity of the ammocoete with the skin exstensions that cover the oral opening to strain out the larger particles and only allow small particles in to the gill area. This animal is upside down. The muscular portion at the bottom of the picture is the oral hood, it is used to help burrow.

One of the largest (>200 mm, or >8 inches) lampreys we collected during this trip. This animal was transforming into an adult and will breed this coming spring (Spring 2015) before dying.

A work up station where animals were brought before being processed. Justin and Chris Powers are in the picture. They don't look too busy, but we were just about to clean up and head home at this point.

We only recaptured 5 of the original released animals but one of them was Brooker! Here Brooker has its marks refreshed and is then ready to recover. It was released again so hopefully it will be captured a third time. Brooker did not move from where it was released last month and only grew 2 mm, but put on 0.5g. Neither of these sound like a lot, but Brooker only weighed 5.56g, so it put on ~10% of its body weight in a month!

Oquaga Creek

Just returned from another sampling trip, this on a tributary to the Delaware River. The Delaware River is special because it is the only river in the United States that does not have a dam on the  main stem. It runs free all the way to the ocean! As a result many migratory fish spawn throughout the Delaware River, including sea lamprey.

I sampled on the closest tributary to Route 17, which for the lamprey is literally their last stop. They cannot move further west on the Delaware. In days past when the Susquehanna was available to migratory fish lamprey likely drove up in huge numbers to spawn through the Susquehanna as well.

Picture looking downstream just after quite a bit of rain and from the bridge which crosses the stream here.

This is the fishing access point where I parked. The NYSDEC just (as in yesterday) cleared this area of brush. They probably did not realize they were making more lamprey habitat by exposing a bunch of loose sand which will now wash into the stream and create sand bars just in time for this year's lamprey to find a new home.

The stream was literally crawling with lamprey. This tiny bucket had 54 animals in it when I took this picture. You can see some are on top of the sand because there is no room for them to burrow. As soon as the picture was done I released them back home.

Here is one of the smaller animals I tagged. This animal was from this year's breeding adults most likely and is hoping to one day have a chance to spawn, but that is many years in the future (probably a decade or more). Meanwhile, he can wear this pretty fluorescent dye. The finger is for scale, I am not pointing an interesting site out to it.

Another small animal with even more tags. I abandoned this effort early on as tagging a small animal this much is very time consuming.

Finally, one last picture of the site looking upstream. I suspect if you could see them there would be more than 1000 lampreys in all the pictures of the site on this blog now. But we will have to wait to find out how close my guesstimate is to the real number until I re-sample.