Pedro Raposo de Almeida on TVI's Diário da Manhã - Life4Lamprey Project
Similar to the situation in recent years, the 2025 lamprey season began with concerns about the scarcity of these animals in Portuguese rivers. In an interview with TVI, Pedro Raposo de Almeida proposes an innovative solution to this problem. 
“What we're proposing is to buy the lampreys from the fishermen, the adults that can reproduce, and then transport them upstream to Coimbra, release them and let them go on their way,” explains MARE's director. “The aim is basically to strengthen the larval population and thereby ensure that we attract more adults in the coming years.”
This solution will not be easy to implement, not only because of the high price of lampreys, which can reach 120 euros per specimen, but also because of the constant threats these animals face and which contribute to their decline, including the fragmentation of their habitat, overfishing and climate change.
To meet these challenges, the Life4Lamprey project was created - Actions to define management strategies for the recovery of aquatic ecosystems: recovery of the sea lamprey in the Mondego River basin. With recent European funding, the project aims to recover the sea lamprey population in the Mondego River by implementing an integrated and innovative solution, which includes the annual translocation of around 400 adult lampreys to upstream locations, and the involvement and awareness-raising of the local population, commercial fishermen, and other interested national and regional entities.
Despite this, Pedro Raposo de Almeida warns that this funding is insufficient to tackle the problem in the long term and on the scale needed, so that it can cover not only the Mondego, but also other rivers in Portugal. “Both the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry must obviously invest so that this can be done quickly in our rivers and that we can strengthen the lamprey population. Otherwise, what we've seen is a continued decline since 2014, and we're going to reach a point where there will obviously be no more commercial exploitation,” explains MARE's director.
This new initiative to recover lamprey populations begins this March.
To see the interview click HERE