Black Lake is more than two hundred miles from Lake Erie, but it gave us a glimpse into how one community manages and celebrates the sturgeon. To learn more about the sturgeon itself and the science behind its restoration, we traveled south, to Ohio.<\/p>\n
Lake Erie’s difficult history<\/p>\n
The Lake Erie watershed has been through multiple environmental disasters. But Erie is the most biologically productive of the Great Lakes. It\u2019s the smallest by volume, but it supports over one hundred different species of fish and a rich variety of habitat types.<\/p>\n
The Toledo Zoo has a large touch tank with several small-ish Lake Sturgeon looping curiously around. The zoo\u2019s campus is sprawled out near the Maumee River, which feeds into Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
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We pet the sturgeon in the tank at the Toledo Zoo.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo part of the really cool thing about Lake Sturgeon is that they\u2019re one of these iconic fish. In the Great Lakes in Lake Erie, they’re our largest fish. The adults get to be six to eight feet long. They can weigh hundreds of pounds,\u201d said Matt Cross, the Director of Vertebrate Conservation at the Toledo Zoo.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon is a common name for a group of fish that exist around the world, not just in Lake Erie. From the Adriatic Sea to the Sea of Japan. But one thing they have in common is that they\u2019re threatened. All species of sturgeon are listed as vulnerable or endangered. But scientists think the Maumee River and Lake Erie historic populations were special.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople will have said that you used to be able to walk across the Maumee River on sturgeon when they would come back to spawn. Now that’s obviously an exaggeration, but probably akin to something like the Passenger Pigeon, where there were so many of them in there that you could see them visibly. And so this used to be a major spawning population for the Lake Sturgeon here, for Lake Erie,\u201d said Cross.<\/p>\n
\u200aSturgeon are an important fish for the Indigenous people who live and lived in the Great Lakes region. They celebrated the sturgeon and harvested them for food. But European settlers saw the sturgeon as a nuisance fish.<\/p>\n
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Jodi Westrick<\/p>\n
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Michigan Public <\/p>\n
Lake Erie has been through a lot, but is still the most biodiverse of all the Great Lakes. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey were clubbed, thrown up on land. We almost eliminated sturgeon from the Great Lakes in less than a hundred years,\u201d said Cross.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until the mid to late 1800\u2019s that the settlers realized they could make a commercial fishery selling sturgeon caviar from Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’re initially harvested heavily for their caviar. And so as we see with a lot of other species, when you start removing, especially females in the populations, you have a really rapid extinction vortex\u2026.as you start to get lower and lower numbers, you get trapped into this, like, downward spiral, right?\u201d said Cross.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon restoration<\/p>\n
They are working hard to return the sturgeon to its rightful place in the waters. This is a big task. Matt Cross is part of a research group working on Lake Sturgeon reintroduction. It is a group effort with a long list of partners, including the Toledo Zoo, Genoa National Fish Hatchery, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS).<\/p>\n
One of the things Matt showed us was the zoo\u2019s streamside sturgeon rearing trailer. It pulls Maumee River water into the tanks where they house baby sturgeon all summer.<\/p>\n
Cross explained how fast they grow when they\u2019re young, as a strategy to get bigger than bite-sized as fast as possible. Baby fish are very vulnerable, but past a certain size, there\u2019s actually nothing in the lake that can eat them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’ve got like this built in armor and so when they’re young, you can see on these smaller fish it sticks out more\u2026 once they get to this size, barring any accidents, like, nothing’s gonna be eating them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sturgeon life cycle<\/p>\n
As adults, they mostly live in lakes, but they reproduce in rivers and that\u2019s where the baby larval fish and juveniles grow up. Then, they move into lakes as they get older. So this fish has a built-in migration as part of its life cycle.<\/p>\n
But sturgeon are migratory and tend to go back to the waters they\u2019re from. And this is called imprinting. There\u2019s a window of time where the sturgeon cue in on an understanding of their home waters. Chemical cues, smell, even. And they will navigate back there later in life.<\/p>\n
Sturgeon preschool<\/p>\n
So part one of this project is catching sturgeon in the spring, right when they\u2019re ready to spawn and then combining their eggs and sperm in containers. Then, the researchers care for the thousands of baby fish.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to joke when we first got sturgeon that my wife became a single mother for two weeks because it was, you know, I’d be in there 16 hours a day working and doing things,\u201d said Cross.<\/p>\n
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Juvenile sturgeon at the Detroit Fish Laboratory.<\/p>\n
This is basically a preschool program for baby sturgeon. They are raised in hatcheries, cared for all summer, until they\u2019re big enough to not be so bite-sized. In the fall, once they\u2019re about over six inches long, they get released back into the rivers.<\/p>\n
The collected and fertilized fish eggs are split into two groups. Half of the 3,000 now-fertilized fish eggs are trucked up to the Genoa National Fish Hatchery in Wisconsin for their six months of pre-K. And the other half stay here, in the zoo trailer. This is part of an experiment to understand how sturgeon imprint and to test the results of being raised in a hatchery unattached to their home waters versus raised in tanks with the river water.<\/p>\n
After visiting the Toledo Zoo, we went to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Detroit River Fish Laboratory to learn more about how sturgeon move around the Great Lakes watershed.<\/p>\n
We met with Jorden McKenna, another scientist working on the Maumee sturgeon reintroduction. McKenna did her Master\u2019s thesis on the Maumee River Lake Sturgeon restoration, and she has been involved in tagging and tracking them across the Lake Erie watershed.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we know that historically in Lake Erie that there were 19 sustainable spawning populations prior to the early 1920s, and those fish unfortunately were removed to pollution, over-fishing and, habitat degradation over time. And so we haven’t seen fish in the Maumee River for over a century,\u201d said McKenna.<\/p>\n
This led the scientists to develop a plan to reintroduce Lake Sturgeon to the Maumee River. But once enacted, because of the long and migratory life of a sturgeon, it will be another 15-20 years before they learn if baby sturgeon they\u2019ve released return to the river to spawn.<\/p>\n
So until then, scientists like McKenna are working to solve the mystery of where the sturgeon go after they\u2019re released. One of the ways they do this is with an existing giant array. The Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS) is a big underwater grid of sensors that can be used to map out the movements of tagged sturgeon.<\/p>\n
The fish are only six or seven inches long when they are first released. They\u2019ve spent the summer in the Genoa National Fish Hatchery or the Toledo Zoo streamside sturgeon trailer and now they are out on their own, swimming around the river and lake. Each fish gets a little acoustic tag with a unique ID. It works kind of like a toll pass token.<\/p>\n
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A baby sturgeon is released down a chute by the Toledo Zoo after it has spent time in its streamside sturgeon rearing trailer.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it picks it up through sound, and then we get a timestamp of when that fish was there. And then we have the GPS coordinates, so we can kind of create a movement pattern and track these fish once they’re released,\u201d said McKenna.<\/p>\n
As they swim near the receivers, they ping like a tiny tollbooth, and scientists get a notification of where they are and when.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody loves what we call, like, the blue dot animation, but these are pretty cool. And this just is like showing you, like, detections over time,\u201d said McKenna as she played some animations of the sturgeon movement data.<\/p>\n
A series of tiny blue dots darted around a map of Lake Erie and the Maumee River. This is how the scientists visualized what is happening below the surface of Lake Erie and the Maumee River.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see them through the entire course of those first six months of life. And it’s cool like having a part in reintroducing this historic fish that used to be here everywhere. They’ve been around for over a hundred million years; they’ve lived through the pollution. But they made it,\u201d said McKenna. \u201cThey’ve survived this long. It’s just they need a little bit of help, or a lot of help, from us to ideally bring back those populations.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Jodi Westrick<\/p>\n
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Jorden McKenna<\/p>\n