Fed’s cuts magnifying invasive sea lamprey concerns for Great Lakes fisheries

Muskegon, Mich. — The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission is reassessing its sea lamprey program for 2025 following federal layoffs at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that provides the manpower to control the invasive critters.

“We’re still assessing the full impact, so it’s a pretty fluid situation,” Greg McClinchey, the GLFC’s director of political and legislative affairs, told Michigan Outdoor News. “We’re working as fast as we can to come up with an approach and a strategy for the 2025 season.”

The GLFC has for decades contracted with the USFWS to carry out chemical treatments in hundreds of Michigan rivers to kill the invasive lamprey. One lamprey can kill up to 40 pounds of fish per year.

“When their staffing gets reduced, that has an impact on the number of staff available” for the work, McClinchey said.

In mid-February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency terminated probationary federal employees across many departments, resulting in the GLFC losing a dozen of the 85 employees that work contractually on sea lamprey control.

That’s a problem, McClinchey said, because “we run a very lean program,” and work typically begins in April.

“That’s part of the reason for the concern,” he said. “This all came down in February for a program that needs to begin in April. That’s one of the problems we’re dealing with.”

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Beyond sea lamprey, the GLFC also coordinates fisheries research and management between Great Lakes states and Canada, though McClinchey said federal cuts have not impacted other operations.

“At this point what we’ve seen is the impact to the sea lamprey program,” he said.

What the impact will be, however, remains unclear.

“There will be an impact … but what that impact will be, how far reaching, I just don’t know,” McClinchey said. “We’re making those determinations.”

The GLFC lamprey program has effectively reduced numbers of the parasitic fish by 90% from historical averages at an annual cost of about $20 million. That investment ultimately kills between 8 million and 9 million lamprey to protect a Great Lakes fishery that provided $6 billion in landed value last year.

“That has a sizable impact on the health … of the Great Lakes,” McClinchey said.

When the GLFC was forced to scale back lamprey efforts amid the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, McClinchey said “we saw increases of sea lamprey populations of 300% in some areas.”

“We do have to recognize we don’t want to have this program interrupted,” he said, suggesting the consequences would be “immense and immediate.”

“If we were to scale back by a third, that would leave 2.5 million lamprey” alive that would have otherwise been killed, McClinchey said. Those lamprey would consume millions of pounds of fish, resulting in potential economic losses that run into the hundreds of millions, he said.

To prevent that outcome, GLFC officials are now working with federal lawmakers to find a potential solution.

“We have great support from the Michigan delegation in Congress,” McClinchey said. “We’re concerned, but we’re cautiously optimistic … we’ll have a strong and effective program in 2025 and beyond.”