A Matter of Taste 
Endangered Pisces 
The Great Lakes white fish is exploited 
by both lampreys and humans 
by Raymond Sokolov 
When my father’s father came to this 
country just after the turn of the century 
in the great wave of Jewish immigration 
from Eastern Europe, he did his green- 
horn best to make a clean break and 
adapt to America. He struck out for the 
last frontier and made a quixotic stab at 
homesteading on bone-dry land in south- 
ern Utah. Cutting his losses after two 
years, he retreated back East during 
World War 1 and resettled in Detroit, 
where he had cousins and where, after 
so much unaccustomed mountain land- 
scape and exotic brushes with Mormons 
and coyotes, he found the familiar com- 
forts of urban life as well as a familiar 
fish. 
In Detroit, as in any Great Lakes 
town of that period, whitefish abounded. 
This fleshy, mild-tasting relative of the 
salmon and the trout, known to ichthyol- 
ogists as Coregonus clupeaformis , has 
many cousins in Europe, especially in 
the Russian empire my grandfather had 
escaped. There, the whitefish Linnaeus 
dubbed C. lavaretus was called sig , and 
Jewish families knew it best either 
smoked or ground up and poached in 
those quenellelike fish dumplings called 
gefilte fish. 
The Great Lakes whitefish was not 
only a perfect substitute for the Euro- 
pean, but it also grew on an American 
scale, averaging four pounds and occa- 
sionally breaking twenty. My grand- 
mother, when I first knew her in the 
forties, was still continuing the old shtetl 
tradition of chopping whitefish for ge- 
filte fish. Like other Jewish grandmoth- 
ers, she tasted the raw fish paste as she 
worked, correcting the seasoning, and 
thereby risking the tapeworms that 
might have lurked in the mixture. 
The Greak Lakes whitefish, 
Coregonus clupeaformis, was 
abundant until the 1950s when 
sea lampreys nearly 
destroyed the population. 
By then, my grandfather had profes- 
sionalized his ancestral ties with white- 
fish; he ran a small fish market in De- 
troit. In our family, then, whitefish 
seemed like a very routine part of every- 
day life. Smoked whitefish for Sunday 
brunch, gefilte fish on holidays, and 
insidiously bony whitefish fillets sprin- 
kled with paprika and broiled for dinner 
all seemed to me unremarkable features 
of growing up in the Great Lakes region. 
Cod was strange, lobster virtually un- 
available, but whitefish was a staple. 
All the while, doom was slithering 
toward us in the jawless, primordial 
form of the sea lamprey. These eellike 
creatures ( Petromyzon marinus) are 
grotesque, with their single nostril, their 
fourteen gill holes, and their toothy, suc- 
torial mouth pad. Lacking a central ner- 
vous system and endowed with a carti- 
laginous spine, they are not, in fact, eels 
(which are structurally more advanced 
and belong to the true or bony fishes, 
Osteichthyes). Along with the hagfish — 
similar members of the Agnatha class — 
lampreys are considered to be the oldest 
surviving vertebrates. 
Ugly and nightmarish, the lamprey 
incubates peacefully enough for several 
years in streams, but then it enters its 
parasitic stage, propels its twenty-inch- 
long form into deeper water, and hunts 
for prey. Vampires of the aquatic world, 
lampreys attach their suctorial mouth to 
other fish. With their teeth, they rasp 
away at the victim’s flesh, then drink its 
blood; their saliva contains an anti- 
coagulant that thins blood and makes 
it easy for them to suck a whitefish 
dry. 
Lampreys did not originally infest the 
Great Lakes. They were let in by the 
building of the New York State Barge 
Canal and the Welland Canal, which 
my other grandfather worked on as an 
engineer. The coup de grace came when 
a thoroughfare for lampreys was inad- 
vertently made by the construction of 
the Saint Lawrence Seaway. In the 
wake of the great seagoing vessels that 
began to ply the new water route to 
Lake Superior and Lake Michigan after 
World War II, P. marinus sinuously 
followed. 
In other countries, such as France, 
the solution to the lamprey plague 
would have been obvious: eat them. 
Lamprey cooked in the style of Bor- 
deaux (see recipe) is a classic dish, so 
Photographs by Adelaide de Menil 
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