toledoblade.com --

The mighty lake sturgeon - an odd-looking North American fish that has been on Earth no fewer than 150 million years and that coexisted with dinosaurs for at least 85 million years - is making a comeback in the Great Lakes region after nearly going extinct in the early 1900s.

Lake sturgeon is one of 27 species of sturgeon worldwide but one of only three that spends its entire life in fresh water. Most others live at sea, seeking out fresh water to spawn.

While all sturgeons seem to have a certain mystique, the lake version especially has captured the public's fascination in recent years as more is learned about its role as an indicator species for Great Lakes water quality.

Last spring, lake sturgeon spawned for the first time in 30 years in the Canadian waters of the Detroit River. The site, at the head of Fighting Island, near Wyandotte, Mich., involved a reef built as part of a joint U.S.-Canadian effort in 2008.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hailed it as another sign that pollution controls in response to the 1972 Clean Water Act are working. The act, one of America's landmark environmental laws, ushered in the modern era of sewage treatment and limits on industrial water discharges.

The discovery boosted hopes that the fish someday could restock its numbers in western Lake Erie. The lake's western basin, between Monroe and Sandusky, is the warmest, shallowest, and most biologically productive part of the Great Lakes.

Earlier this month, federal officials touted a one-acre site of spawning habitat that a chemical giant, the BASF Corp., built in the Detroit River's Trenton Channel for lake sturgeon, as well as for walleye, largemouth bass, and smallmouth bass.

The $100,000 project followed the company's multimillion-dollar cleanup of a site that had once been one of the river's most toxic.

'Show-stopper'

Even with their gradual comeback-in-the-making, today's lake sturgeon make up just 1 percent of the numbers found in the Great Lakes region in the late 1800s. They are listed as threatened in Michigan and Ontario and endangered in Ohio waters of the Great Lakes.

Indeed, many Native Americans - especially the Menominee of northern Wisconsin, one of the few tribes in the Great Lakes region that was never pushed westward - have drawn parallels between the plight of lake sturgeon and of the American buffalo.

Individually, a lake sturgeon can live for nearly 200 years, some growing to lengths of more than six feet and topping out at a weight of 300 pounds. One on record grew to be nearly 8 feet long.

John Hartig, manager of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, described them as "big torpedo fish," strong enough to knock over three adult men.

"It's all muscle," he said.

With an odd-looking snout, leather-like skin, a retractable mouth that can hang like a hose from the underside of its head, and a body armored with rows of thick plates instead of scales, lake sturgeons have an intimidating look - akin to that of a waterborne dinosaur ready to do battle.

Mr. Hartig said they are a "show-stopper" around children.

"When you take kids and show them a fish that is five or six feet long, they are blown away," Mr. Hartig said. "It's a living dinosaur. It's been around that long. They ask, 'How has that thing survived when so many other things have gone extinct?'•"

Exploitation

Lake sturgeon were so prevalent in the late 1800s that they were used as fuel for Great Lakes steamships.

Native Americans hunted them for thousands of years, but their numbers didn't dwindle until European settlers arrived. The newcomers viewed them as a trashy, bottom-feeding fish that had to be thinned out so that other types of fish could thrive.

Sturgeon eggs were made into caviar, one of the world's most coveted delicacies. The market for them became especially strong in Russia, depleting the population of its sexually active adult sturgeon.

Lake sturgeon also had trouble sustaining their numbers as the Industrial Revolution led to dams being constructed along almost every Great Lakes tributary the fish had used to spawn, according to Bruce Manny, a fishery biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey's Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor.

"All of those dams are what cut sturgeon off from spawning," Mr. Manny said.

For the Menominee, dams built in 1892 cut them off from one of their primary sources of food and cultural inspirations. The tribe attempted for years to get the government to install fish ladders or other devices so the lake sturgeon could get back to their traditional spawning grounds, according to Dave Grignon, director of the Menominee Tribal Historical Preservation Office.

In 1993 - after 100 years of separation - the Menominees worked out a deal with Wisconsin officials to have the state Department of Natural Resources capture and deliver a number of sturgeon to the reservation each spring. In recent years, that has been about 15 annually.

The comeback

There are signs of promise for them in the Detroit-to-Toledo corridor, even though there are probably fewer than 1,000 of the fish in Lake Erie today, Mr. Manny said.

About 20,000 more of them exist just north of Detroit, the region's second most-abundant cluster. Many are in Lake St. Clair, but the majority are in the St. Clair River, he said.

Those pale in comparison to the 60,000-plus sturgeon in Wisconsin's Lake Winnebago and its tributaries, especially the Wolf and the Fox rivers.

Ron Bruch, a Wisconsin fisheries supervisor who took over management of the Winnebago sturgeon population in 1990, said sturgeon are found in areas where lake ecology is in balance among nursery grounds, water quality, and tiny organisms that smaller fish eat.

"The thing that resonates is that if you have a healthy sturgeon population, you're doing the right thing for all the rest of the environment in your system because they really are very much an indicator species," he said.

Wisconsin officials have been able to rebuild the sturgeon population in and around Lake Winnebago with the help of a conservation group called Sturgeon for Tomorrow, founded in 1977 by longtime fisherman Ron Casper, a retired machinist.

Anti-poaching efforts

Now the world's largest sturgeon group, Sturgeon for Tomorrow has raised more than $700,000 over the last 32 years for projects that include the establishment of volunteer anti-poaching forces, spawning and nursery site construction on the Wolf River, sturgeon population assessments, and research into an artificial reproduction program.

The group, which now has five Wisconsin chapters and a presence in other states, including Michigan, said it has helped Wisconsin keep alive the tradition of sturgeon fishing on Lake Winnebago while sustaining the fish population.

Elsewhere, any sturgeon caught must be immediately released back into the water. In Wisconsin, the massive sturgeon are not caught by rod and reel. Nor are they commercially netted, a practice that contributed to their decline.

Each February, a limited number of people are issued permits to spear sturgeon through the Lake Winnebago ice, just as the Menominee had for centuries. Past hunts have been as few as two and as many as 16 days.

Mr. Manny said Wisconsin has set a model for sturgeon-recovery efforts, not only in management policies but also in the pride that people take in the fish.

"It took a long time, but they taught the public to sustain sturgeon out there and not poach them," Mr. Manny said. "That's the big change in Wisconsin. There's been a big attitudinal change."

Though strides have been made in restoring the Great Lakes over the past generation, many problems remain.

Mr. Manny said there are far too many oil spills. He said he has been frustrated by efforts to get municipal operators to stop chlorinating their water and sewer pipes for six weeks in the spring when sturgeon spawn.

"Clearly, there is a long way to go," Mr. Hartig said. "We need to build a record of success for these things to keep the money coming. That shows there's a return on the investment that is really important."

Contact Tom Henry at:
thenry@theblade.com
or 419-724-6079.

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