Join us on this year-long learning adventure in our Love Where You Live webinar series. Once a month we will host a guest speaker sharing their knowledge and experiences that highlight unique qualities of the KS that are the crux of why we love where we live and why conservation in this region is important.
For the 9th talk in the series, we will discover how the Klamath River Basin supports the highest diversity of lamprey species of any single watershed in the world, with the anadromous Pacific lamprey suggested to have been the river’s biomass-dominant fish species historically. Ecologically, Pacific lamprey are important contributors of marine-derived nutrients and organic matter to the food web of headwater streams which are far inland from the Pacific Ocean. They also are a primary food source for marine mammals and likely a trophic level buffer to some species of migrating salmon as marine mammals preferentially consume Pacific lamprey. Culturally, Pacific lamprey are a tribal trust fish species protected under tribal treaty and continue to provide direct subsistence when other high lipid foods (e.g., salmon) are unavailable to Native American Tribes. With a winter run-timing, lamprey provide high caloric values (2x-4x kcal/g of salmonids) for indigenous people coinciding with the coldest season of the year.
Our Guest Speaker is Keith Parker, Yurok Tribe Senior Fisheries Biologist. Keith received a Bachelor of Science degree in Fisheries Biology in 2015 from Humboldt State University (HSU) and a Master of Science degree in Natural Resources (Fisheries) from HSU in 2018 with a thesis on conservation genetics. He examined the spatiotemporal genetic structure of Klamath River Pacific lamprey using high-throughput genetic sequencing and discovered two new ecotypes of “eels”, naming them using words from the Yurok language. His goal is to be a catalyst for positive environmental change by being a “translator” in bridging the gaps between traditional ecological knowledge and modern science.
