I pray, you pray…

PACIFIC LAMPREY are not endearing at first glance. The most striking feature of their almost featureless bodies is their soul-boring cobalt-blue eyes. But what you can never unsee is the “oral disc,” a jawless, hook-toothed sucker mouth that seems perfect for gobbling space mercenaries into sand dunes. “They look like scary-ass monsters,” said Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe and a former fish biologist. Ralph Lampman, a lamprey research biologist at Yakama Fisheries, compared lamprey to Yoda and said they have the wisdom of Jedi masters.

Lamprey hail from the infraphylum , jawless fish with a spinal cord but no vertebrae — only a terrifying cartilage skeleton. Don’t Google it. Like salmon, they’re anadromous, growing up in freshwater before migrating out to sea. They return to spawn but lack site fidelity, meaning they don’t return to their home spawning grounds. An adult lamprey in the Columbia River could have hatched upstream in Russia or Japan. They can swim a thousand miles inland, even to landlocked Idaho, where they spawn and die, depositing marine-derived nutrients that grow Pacific conifer forests, including the mighty redwoods—a peer amongst the oldest living things on earth. “Forests