Elder’s devotion to ugly fish lives on after his tragic death

SPALDING, Idaho — Like salmon, lampreys are born in fresh water and journey to the ocean for several years before they return to spawn. They once numbered in the millions up and down the Columbia and Snake river basins of Washington and Idaho, but unlike with wild salmon, few people seem to care that lampreys are now nearly gone. But Elmer Crow Jr. did.

Crow, who died tragically a year ago, would sometimes see lone lampreys undulate past while he was out fishing. He said he always wondered if he was seeing the last one. A Nez Perce tribal elder and fisheries worker, he worked tirelessly to save the ancient fish from extinction. He encouraged an experimental technique called translocation — gathering lampreys from the lower Columbia River, where they are still relatively plentiful, and releasing them in Idaho mountain streams in hopes they would spawn there.

When Crow and others drove to John Day Dam on the lower Columbia to collect the eel-like adult lampreys and haul them back to the Nez Perce hatchery in late 2006, nobody really knew if translocation would work. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have been running a lamprey translocation program since the early 2000s, but only last year have they started to see small but encouraging returns of adult lampreys.

This summer, when fisheries biologists sorted through the findings in a screw trap anchored in a central Idaho mountain stream, they discovered Crow was right.

The trap, which collects outmigrating aquatic life, held 119 juvenile Pacific lampreys, which are called ammocetes in their larval stage. Genetic testing showed that 118 of the blind wriggling ammocetes were offspring of adult lampreys released in early 2007 by Crow and a Nez Perce fisheries team in their translocation program.

Acting on Elmer Crow’s urgings but without any directed federal funding from an Endangered Species Act listing, the tribe began driving a pickup truck to Columbia River dams with a 400-gallon tank in the bed to hold lampreys.

After surviving five heart attacks, Crow believed “he was in bonus time,” two of his sons said. He became an energetic fighter to stave off extinction for the lamprey. He spoke of lampreys in terms of ecosystem balance — that they had a role in the basin and, even if no one was sure what it was, that didn’t make it any less important.

“Elmer always said the reason the salmon are not coming back is because the eels weren’t here anymore,” Lynda Crow said of her husband’s work. The ammocetes are filter feeders and help with the health of streams, she said. They are also a food source for young salmon and, being fattier and oilier, likely were a first choice for predators, taking some pressure off salmon smolts. Like salmon, lampreys charge streams with nutrients when they spawn and die.

“The Nez Perce had zero budget, and were running on Elmer’s passion,” said filmmaker Jeremy Monroe, who featured Crow in his 2013 documentary “The Lost Fish.”

Noting the ancient lineage of lampreys in the Pacific Northwest, Crow delivered a powerful indictment in the film: “How do we let something that’s 450 [million], 500 million years old go extinct? Shame on us — the whole bunch of us — for not paying attention to what was going on.”

Even after the feds refused to list the lamprey as endangered, Crow and others kept battling with entities such as the Bonneville Power Administration and the Corps of Engineers to consider lampreys in various projects.

“He would go to these big meetings and say, ‘No eels, no deals,’” Lynda Crow said. “He was known as Eelmer, which was appropriate.”