Lamprey fishing was banned by the Bordeaux administrative court on May 5.
For the last 35 fishermen of this ancestral species, which is part of the local heritage, the decision is difficult to take.
The association at the origin of the appeal, for its part, denounces too much pressure on a species in great danger.
The State has appealed the judgment of the administrative court, and must soon issue new fishing quotas.
Who is responsible for the progressive disappearance of the lamprey in the rivers of the southwest?
If the scientific community agrees that the populations of migratory fish, in general, have been in free fall in Europe in recent years, in particular because of the proliferation of dams on the rivers, and the presence of PCBs in rivers.
An aggravating factor, however, directly threatens the survival of the lamprey, an ancestral aquatic species that can be considered at the crossroads between fish and eel.
For the environmental association DMA, Defense of aquatic environments, this X factor is called fishing, which adds a fatal pressure on the species.
For fishermen, it is the catfish, a "super predator" fish, introduced into French rivers in the 1980s and which feeds, among other things, on lamprey.
In this showdown, DMA has the advantage today.
The association obtained from the Administrative Court of Bordeaux, on May 5, a ban on lamprey fishing in the Garonne-Dordogne basin, in the name of the precautionary principle.
The state appealed this decision.
But in the meantime, the lamprey fishing season, which runs from December to April, is fast approaching.
The fishermen, who consider themselves to be “collateral damage”, are thus awaiting, in October, the publication of the new decree which will frame the next fishing season.
And it is possible that the authorities will ask them to limit their quantity to 20% of what they usually take.
Towards a UNESCO intangible heritage classification?
With 35 lamprey fishermen still practicing in Gironde, the subject is both environmental, economic, but also heritage.
The recipe for Bordeaux-style lamprey has been passed down from generation to generation since the Middle Ages, and can be found on several good tables in the department, including starred restaurants.
“I have known lamprey since I was very young, and today I have the chance to put it on my menu, in different forms, testifies Quentin Merlet, the chef of the Grand Barrail in Saint-Emilion.
It would be catastrophic, from a tourist and economic point of view, to ban it, and it saddens me to consider no longer being able to offer this recipe, especially to customers who come specifically for that.
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Faced with such challenges, several elected officials launched a mobilization on October 2 in Sainte-Terre, the self-proclaimed capital of the lamprey, near Saint-Emilion, to “save the lamprey.
“Even evoking the possibility of a classification in the intangible cultural heritage of Unesco, to sanctuary the practice.
A conservation status in the Atlantic region estimated as “unfavorable bad”
A migratory fish that is born in rivers, before leaving to grow in the Atlantic Ocean and returning to the river environment to reproduce, "the sea lamprey was classified as an endangered species in July 2019 by the International Union for the Conservation of nature (IUCN) is the fourth level (out of five) of vulnerability of a threatened species.
Its state of conservation in the Atlantic region is estimated as “unfavorable bad” by the National Inventory of Universal Heritage,” the court found in its judgment.
In addition, continues the judgment, "it emerges from a study carried out in 2017 by the association Migrateurs Garonne-Dordogne (Migado) that the results of the monitoring of the migration and reproduction of the sea lamprey, both on the Dordogne (nearly 600 individuals) but also on the scale of the Garonne-Dordogne basin (no passage through Golfech), remain extremely low (...) The lack of renewal of the population, put in parallel with a strong exploitation of the stock, led to a situation deemed alarming by the lamprey technical committee.
While since the start of monitoring in 2003, the population has shown a good state of abundance, for 6 years, the spawning stock has clearly decreased, reaching in some years the lowest values ever observed.
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The broodstock has collapsed”
"The lamprey population in France has collapsed over the past ten years," summarizes Philippe Garcia, president of the DMA association.
In the early 2000s, we caught about 100,000 lampreys per year.
In 2019, fishermen identified 43,000, and at the level of passes and spawning grounds [areas where species reproduce], it is difficult to find 500. We will arrive in a period when it will disappear, because the stock of spawners collapsed.
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Fishermen dispute these figures.
“In Gironde, professional fishermen catch around 69,000 lampreys and amateur fishermen around 8,000, according to Sabine Durand.
We are now only 35 professional fishermen, [against a hundred fifteen years ago], it's nothing.
We agree that there is a problem upstream of the river, because of dams, global warming, pollution, that special attention must be paid to migratory fish, but in relation to the number of lampreys present downstream in the fishing areas, we do not understand why a ban is put in place.
And if we are banned from fishing, the lampreys will still be eaten by catfish, a species that is increasingly present, with increasingly larger specimens.
VS'
is she who comes to aggravate the situation.
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The catfish, top predator or just opportunist?
For fishermen, there is indeed no doubt that it is this apex predator, whose size can exceed 2.50 m, which is at the origin of the collapse of the lamprey population.
“It has been denounced for years and two years ago, a scientific study showed that the catfish represented a real threat to migratory fish, maintains Sabine Durand.
Faced with this, instead of having an action against the catfish, we are prevented from fishing, knowing that the pressure that we exert is only around 20% on the passage of the lampreys.
It's crazy.
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Philippe Garcia does not share this analysis at all.
“The catfish is the scapegoat of fishermen.
It is an animal specialized in the predation of weakened, sick or even dead animals, he explains.
It is an opportunist, who actually feasts on lampreys, because they systematically die on their spawning grounds after reproduction, so they inevitably become, at some point, the target of catfish, and it is normal to find them in stomachs. catfish.
But this is not what has caused the collapse of the lamprey since 2011. What's more, the fishermen have never been able to demonstrate that the lampreys found in the catfish have not reproduced.
The few examinations that have been made have even shown that they were lampreys that had already spawned.
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"To prohibit us from lamprey fishing is to prohibit us from working"
The association thus requests that the ban obtained from the administrative court be applied as soon as possible.
“There is a risk that the real end of this fishery will only come when there are no more fish, like what happened with sturgeon, salmon or shad.
These are three species that have been driven to extinction in the estuary.
We stopped fishing only after..."
For the fishermen, "prohibiting us from fishing for lamprey means prohibiting us from working, because there is nothing else left, apart from eel..." First element of response from here to the at the end of October, after the Cogepomi (Committee for the management of migratory fish) on which the prefecture will rely to establish the fishing order.
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