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.