A parasitic ‘vampire fish’ has been spotted in a Virginia river that is rarely seen by humans and while it is invasive, experts said it’s a good sign. 

An Alexandria local pulled what is called a sea lamprey from the Potomac River with his bare hands and tossed the nearly two-foot-long eel-like creature onto dry land.

The fish gets the nickname for its sucker-like mouth and pointed teeth, which it uses to latch onto its victim and feed on their bodily fluids –  sometimes feasting for weeks.

The Potomac River has been long polluted and government agencies have taken steps to clean it up, making the lamprey’s appearance a sign that the pollution is finally ebbing away because the creature is sensitive to toxins .

Sea lampreys are an invasive species initially native to the Atlantic Ocean, but they invaded the Great Lakes in the 1800s through manmade canals and shipping docks. 

The population started growing in the Potomac in 2002, which experts believed was a positive sign for the river.

‘The resurgence of sea lamprey is another indication that water quality is getting better,’ Jim Cummins, the then-associate director for the Living Resources Section told the Potomac Bay Reporter at the time. 

‘Sea lamprey are fairly sensitive to pollution.’

The 23-year-old man posted an Instagram video of him catching the vampire fish, claiming it was ‘the first sea lamprey caught in the Potomac River.’

The fish migrate from the Chesapeake Bay to the freshwater river each year to lay their eggs, which suggests this is not the first sighting.

However, he appeared shocked, repeatedly saying: ‘Oh my gosh’ as the person recording dares him to put the lamprey on his arm.

‘I’m not doing that,’ he said, but called his catch ‘insane.’

People responded to the video, saying that because it’s an invasive species and should be removed.

‘They eat other fish and infect them with parasites with a bite so, they’ll eventually die. They are invasive. Check what damage they did in Michigan and what they had to do to fix it,’ one person commented.

A single female can produce as many as 100,000 eggs and as the population rose in the Great Lakes during the 1940s and 1950s, they nearly decimated the lake trout and whitefish, prompting efforts to eliminate them. 

Another person simply said: ‘Kill it.’ 

The river was given a ‘B’ grade last year for its cleanliness, up from the ‘D’ ranking it received in 2011.

Studies are being conducted to determine if the river will be clean enough to lift the ban on swimming in the next two to three years, according to the Potomac Conservancy.

While social media called for the sea lamprey to be killed, its presence in the  is not harmful to the ecosystem.

The Chesapeake Bay Program said after the lamprey reaches maturity at four to five years, they leave the freshwater rivers to live out the rest of their life in the ocean.

The fish gets the nickname for its sucker-like mouth and pointed teeth, which it uses to latch onto its victim and feed on their bodily fluids – sometimes feasting for weeks

The lamprey has the appearance of an eel, with a long body measuring between 12 and 22 inches long and brown and yellow skin that is covered in dark spots. It has a sucker-like mouth and pointed teeth to grasp onto its victim and feed on their body fluids, sometimes for as long as three weeks until the fish dies.

Lampreys have existed for millions of years, but they have become threatened by habitat loss and chemical treatments called lampricide which kill lamprey larvae and has reduced their population by more than 90 percent. 

They have the appearance of an eel, with a long body measuring between 12 and 22 inches long and brown and yellow skin that is covered in dark spots.

These fish can accidentally latch on to humans who are swimming in the water, and while the bite won’t be fatal, it is painful and untreated wounds could cause an infection.

Sea lamprey are native to the area and have existed in the Potomac for years, but they don’t typically take fishermen’s bait and the polluted water has previously hidden them from view. 

The fish is believed to have once been plentiful in the Chesapeake Bay, which flows into the Potomac, but the population was reduced in part because of increased sediment, pollution, and blockage of spawning areas by dams. 

Since 1989, the Alice Ferguson Foundation has spearheaded the Annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup and the DC Water Clean Rivers Program has invested $2.6 billion to reduce pollution.

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) – Registration is open for a statewide virtual job fair in West Virginia.

This week is the latest in a series of job fairs organized by Workforce West Virginia.

The job fair remotely connects West Virginians with over 100 employers to learn about and apply for jobs.

Workforce West Virginia Employment Services Director Maureen Persons said people can view employers and apply for jobs for the job fair until this Friday.

On Wednesday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:30, there will be a live event where job seekers can speak directly to recruiters to learn more about available job opportunities.

Persons said they have 931 job seekers registered for the event and over 100 employers in fields including healthcare, manufacturing, and public service.

You can find more information about the job fair and register here.

Copyright 2024 WTAP. All rights reserved.

A federal appeals court has ruled that Virginia’s $350,000 punitive damages cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis in a case against white supremacists who organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

A Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in a 3-0 vote reversed a federal district court that had limited the punitive damages that the eight plaintiffs would receive to $350,000 aggregate. The appeals court found that in a case where there are multiple plaintiffs, the $350,000 cap applies to each plaintiff, not to the group as a whole.

In the opinion written by Chief Judge Albert Diaz, the appeals court rested its decision largely on the statute’s not mentioning plaintiffs and the fact that the state did not permit multiple plaintiff actions until well after the cap statute was drafted and enacted.

As a civil jury trial in 2022 proved, the protester-defendants — who included white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis— conspired to commit racially motivated violence to, in part, “defend Western civilization and white men against perceived enemies—specifically, Jewish persons, Black persons, and their white gentile traitor allies.” The protesters “sought violence, planned for violence, sparked violence, engaged in violence, and afterwards, glorified the violence” committed.

The jury found the defendants guilty of civil conspiracy; racial, religious, or ethnic harassment under Virginia’s hate-crime statute; assault and battery; and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Jury Award

The jury’s damages award against the protester-defendants totaled over $26 million, split among compensatory damages which the district court assigned jointly and severally against the defendants, and a historic $24 million in punitive damages. The district court ultimately slashed the punitive damages to $350,000 by applying Virginia’s punitive damages cap across the eight plaintiffs who sought them.

Defendants Michael Hill, Michael Tubbs, League of the South, and Nathan Damigo challenged the district court’s decision to hold them jointly and severally liable for the $26 million in compensatory damages award, while the plaintiffs challenged the district court’s decision to apply Virginia’s punitive damages cap across all plaintiffs.

Because the jury found that all the defendants engaged in a conspiracy, the district court applied the collective compensatory damages. The Fourth Circuit found no error in this part of the district court’s decision.

The defendants also argued that Virginia’s punitive damages cap should apply to the jury’s punitive damages award, reducing them to $350,000, and that the damages were constitutionally excessive.

The plaintiffs’ argued that the punitive damages cap only applies in “run-of-the-mill” tort and insurance cases and not at all than in the hate-crime context. The plaintiffs’ fallback contention was that the cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis, with each plaintiff receiving $350,000.

The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that the punitive damages cap should not be applied at all and that the cap applies on a per-plaintiff basis.

The Fourth Circuit also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that punitive damages statute does not apply to hate crimes. The court cited the plain language of the statute that says it applies to ‘all actions” and not just some actions. The court noted that Virginia passed its hate-crime statute only a year after passing its punitive damages cap. It therefore had an opportunity to exclude hate crimes from the cap’s purview but it didn’t.

However, citing history, statute language and public policy, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs that the cap applies per-plaintiff.

The statute says in part that the “total amount awarded for punitive damages against all defendants found to be liable shall be determined by the trier of fact. In no event shall the total amount awarded for punitive damages exceed $350,000.”

First the appeals court noted that the punitive damages statute doesn’t include similar “all plaintiffs” language as it does “all defendants” and the court believes there are good reasons for that legislative drafting. If lawmakers meant to treat defendants and plaintiffs equally under the statute, even with the “all defendants” qualifier, that would render that term superfluous.

Another reason relates to the state’s historical understanding of joinder. and the fact that when the punitive damages cap was enacted in 1987 the common law largely didn’t permit separate plaintiffs to jointly adjudicate their claims. So an “action” was typically one plaintiff prosecuting one claim. There were no multiple plaintiff actions.

Virginia adhered to this common-law approach until 1995, when the General Assembly permitted a court to join separate actions, or six or more plaintiffs to join in a single action. But these joinder principles were enacted after the punitive damages cap passed in 1987.

“As a matter of text and history then, the General Assembly could not have contemplated including a multi-plaintiff limitation in the punitive damages cap because single-plaintiff actions were the norm,” the appeals court explained.

Furthermore, the court found that a per- plaintiff reading serves public policy interests by incentivizing plaintiffs to join their claims where appropriate. “Were we to hold otherwise, any plaintiffs seeking punitive damages against a defendant (or defendants) for a single occurrence would have 350,000 reasons not to join their claims. And had that been the law here, the district court likely would have faced eight trials in a loop of repeat operative facts and players,” Judge Diaz wrote.

Photo: James Kolenich, left, attorney for Jason Kessler, speaks with the media after a jury gave a partial verdict in Sines v Kessler case Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, at the Federal Courthouse in Charlottesville, Va. A jury ordered white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $25 million in damages Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, over violence that erupted during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The lawsuit accused some of the country’s most well-known white nationalists of plotting the violence, including Jason Kessler. (Andrew Shurtleff/The Daily Progress via AP)

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