Forget Cadborosaurus, that imaginary arriviste. Forget the plesiosaurs that appeared only 250 million years ago, then vanished 75 million years ago. Vancouver Island has its own, actual living fossil.
The Cowichan Lake lamprey, or Vancouver lamprey, is a little-known creature that lives only in Cowichan, Mesachie and Bear lakes. Its roots reach back deep in time.
Like other lampreys, including its close relative the Pacific lamprey, which inhabits rivers and the ocean along the Pacific coast, the Cowichan Lake lamprey retains many features of its first ancestors from 360 million years ago.
It has a long, slender, dark, eel-shaped body. Like sharks and rays, its spine is made of cartilage, the stiff but bendy material that shapes our ears and noses. It has no jaw, but its round, sucking mouth is lined with a series of tiny, sharp teeth.
It鈥檚 also a parasite. Adult lampreys use their mouths to glom onto other fish, then use their tiny rows of teeth to grate away the skin and suck blood from their prey.
As critters go, this local creature is both cool and creepy.
First discovered and recognized as its own species in the 1980s, it evolved from Pacific lamprey trapped in Cowichan Lake 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age.
Unlike its free-roaming Pacific lamprey cousin, which spawns in rivers but spends its adult life in saltwater, the Cowichan Lake lamprey spawns and spends its entire life in its three freshwater lakes.
It uses sandbars at the mouths of lake-feeding rivers to lay and incubate its eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the lampreys鈥� larvae, called ammocoetes (rhymes with feats), continue to live in and around the sandbars for years while they grow, feeding on decomposing plant and animal matter filtered from the currents.
The restricted territory means the species is highly vulnerable to climate change, changes in water levels, water management, pollution, sediment from runoff and shoreline development.
Many of the same issues threaten the lamprey adults鈥� main food source, the coho salmon that spawn and hatch in the area鈥檚 rivers and streams and spend their first weeks or months in the lake before heading down the Cowichan River to the ocean.
In 2003, the lamprey was listed as a threatened species under the federal Species at Risk Act. Killing, harming, harassing or capturing Cowichan Lake lamprey is illegal, as is possessing, collecting, buying, selling or trading the lamprey or any of its body parts. It鈥檚 also illegal to damage or destroy its nests or habitat.
That protection increases the pressure on governments and the local community to resolve the longstanding issues facing Cowichan Lake.
During recent years, we鈥檝e repeatedly read about, seen and experienced the effects of drought and growing demand for water on lake levels.
Salmon fry have had to be hand rescued from pools in the drying rivers and creeks that normally feed into the lake. Adult salmon returning to spawn in those waterways have had to be caught and trucked to the lake because Cowichan River levels have been so low.
Swaths of second-growth timber harvested young from mountainsides around the lake in the last 15 years have created runoff and sediment problems.
During the 11 serious droughts since 1998, lake levels have fallen, then fallen further, leaving lakeside docks high and dry.
Some years, Catalyst Paper, which operates the weir at the mouth of the lake, has had to pump water over the weir to keep enough water flowing in the river to keep its mill at Crofton running. Before it can pump, however, the company needs permits to manage the impacts of lowering the lake further on the lamprey.
Raising the weir would solve many of the lamprey鈥檚 problems. The solution was first proposed years ago and hotly debated, but progress has happened. Local users, property owners and others with an interest in the lake have been consulted, and the engineering and design work and detailed mapping of the lake鈥檚 boundaries is underway 鈥� a process expected to take three years. After that, funding and actual construction will be considered.
The Cowichan Lake lamprey has endured 360 million years of evolution, 10,000 to 15,000 years as a species, and 17 years as an official threatened species. This true living fossil may have to hold on for several years yet for some relief from the problems we鈥檝e created and are seeking to solve.