We were close to losing our entire fishery in the Great Lakes, recalled Greg McClinchey, director of legislative affairs and policy for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, when talking of the lamprey’s ravages in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

“They decimated certain species like lake trout and drove others — like some ciscoes — into extinction,” he said. “Those were dark days. But we were doing a crappy job managing the Great Lakes in many areas.” The lake trout population has recently come back to its original numbers, he said.

This vampire parasite that sucks the blood and bodily fluids from fish — mainly trout and salmon — initially found its way into the Great Lakes fisheries in the 19th century when the Wellman Canal was built to bypass the Niagara River and Niagara Falls to connect

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