Farmers, anglers, a fisheries board, the ESB and Dúchas have joined forces on a tributary of the River Shannon to study and protect what is widely regarded as one of the ugliest fish.
Dr Fran Igoe, fisheries officer with the Shannon Regional Fisheries Board, said the attempt to save the sea lamprey on the Mulkear river was "important for the community as a whole and from the point of view of the development of eco-tourism, as well as for other species of fish such as salmon ".
The lamprey, known locally as "the lamper eel", is a primitive eel-like fish, lacking true bone and jaws. It feeds by attaching itself to its host, the salmon.
"This mode of behaviour has given them a bad name," Dr Igoe said. But while lamprey have decimated salmon stocks in the Great Lakes in North America, their relationship with Irish salmon is "symbiotic", he said.
"The sea lamprey enter the river to spawn usually about May and dig the same gravels used by salmon to spawn later in the year. Essentially, they clean and prepare the beds for use by the salmon in the autumn." The sea lamprey can be seen from Annacotty bridge building their redds with stones and will often lift large stones, "twice the size of a fist", Dr Igoe says.
However, the lamprey are under threat and face extinction in many places because of the destruction of weirs and pollution. "Lamprey are not as good swimmers as salmon and are more vulnerable," Dr Igoe explained.
A study by the fisheries board and Dúchas has established the Mulkear river is now one of the richest areas for all three kinds, sea lamprey, river lamprey and brook lamprey.
The EU have listed the lamprey (and the salmon) as species requiring special protection under the Habitats Directive and Ireland is obliged to designate Special Areas of Conservation to protect them. Most of the Mulkear will shortly become a SAC.
The fisheries board, with the co-operation of landowners, Dúchas, the ESB, the IFA and the ICMSA, aims to secure funding under the EU LIFE nature programme to conserve both the salmon and the lamprey on the Mulkear.
Lamprey are notoriously difficult to monitor and there are virtually no data on the stocks in Ireland.
It is now proposed to use radio-tracking of the lamprey on the Mulkear by means of special fish- friendly tags. The fisheries board has already established the lamprey are unable to surmount weirs.