In 1955, U.S. and Canadian officials established the Great Lakes Fishery Commission—a bilateral treaty organization intended to root out what was often referred to as the “vampire fish.” Since then, the sea-lamprey population has been slashed by more than ninety per cent, thanks to annual treatments and ongoing research. Controlling the species has saved the region’s fishing industry, now worth six billion dollars a year.
Pull back the curtain on even the most natural-seeming landscapes and there is often a government initiative invisibly maintaining business as usual. But, for many public programs, success can bring problems of its own. “If no one really knows of the threat, it makes it harder, in lean times, to say, ‘Hey, we need this money,’ ” Ethan Baker, the chairman of the G.L.F.C., told me.
Early this year, as part of what many federal workers came to refer to as the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the lamprey-control program was unceremoniously gutted by the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. Twelve probationary workers—some of whom were long-tenured employees who had recently transitioned into new positions—were fired. Presented with an uncertain future, other longtime staff members took buyouts. The roughly twenty-five seasonal workers who are the backbone of the annual control effort couldn’t be brought on, because of Trump’s government-wide hiring freeze. Spending on federal credit cards was capped at a dollar, making it impossible to book travel arrangements to and from treatment sites.
The commission—which is not itself a public agency but an international organization that contracts with federal employees in the U.S. and Canada—pleaded with local congressional representatives. Residents did, too. In 2020 and 2021, when COVID-era travel restrictions had reduced treatments, lamprey populations exploded. In Lake Ontario, treatments stopped entirely for one year, and the number of lampreys increased tenfold.
Eventually, the lamprey program was granted an exemption from the DOGE cuts, and allowed to restaff. But crucial treatments were delayed, and early-season assessments—which, ironically, make the effort more efficient by determining exactly where to treat—had to be reduced. Across the country, many similar programs, and the research they depend on, are being bled dry, as billions of dollars are hacked from the federal budget.
Of the more than five thousand tributaries that empty into the Great Lakes, about one in ten is infested with lampreys. Every year, crews treat about a quarter of the offending streams. Upper Michigan’s Manistique River system, which has about three hundred infested miles, is the site of this year’s biggest deployment. In two weeklong purges, crews killed an estimated one million lamprey larvae there, at a cost of $1.4 million. (In total, the program costs about twenty million dollars annually.)
To determine where to treat, federal workers must first figure out where the lampreys are. They pace the shallow banks of the tributaries—where lampreys live and breed, before going to the lakes to hunt—and shock the bottom with handheld electrified paddles. If any lampreys are present, they will wriggle out of their muddy burrows. The workers must then expose the ecosystem to a specific concentration of poison, perfectly calibrated to kill lampreys and not many other fish, for nine uninterrupted hours. Treatment supervisors generate a unique model for each river, adjusting for variables as seemingly inconsequential as the appearance of a new beaver dam, which can completely alter the flow. “We were lucky this time,” Lori Criger, a fish biologist who oversees treatments, told me. “It rained right before we got here, and not during the treatment.”
The lamprey-control program is the world’s only purchaser of 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol, also known as T.F.M., or, simply, lampricide, which was identified in 1956 at a research lab at the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. As the lamprey crisis worsened, various chemical companies sent compounds to the lab, which was searching for a panacea. “They would get a chemical, sometimes in a plain brown envelope from the Defense Department or something—‘Here, try this,’ ” Marc Gaden, the G.L.F.C.’s executive secretary, told me. The research team ran “pickle jar” tests: they’d leave lampreys, native fish, and a chemical in a vessel together overnight. In the morning, they’d record the outcome—usually something like “Dead trout, dead lamprey,” or, occasionally, “Dead trout, live lamprey.”
