Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old:Scientists rethinking how to save them
cbc.ca82 points by bookofjoe 3 days ago
82 points by bookofjoe 3 days ago
Kayak fished the St. Croix river last year, on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for smallmouth bass. Crystal clear water. Floated over several huge sturgeon, 4-6 feet long. The way they look, it feels like coming across a dinosaur. Thankfully they're bottom feeders.
Acipenser transmontanus are harmless sucker mouth fish, and lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea.
They are usually strictly catch and release, but in a kayak could probably pull you a great distance. They are deceptively strong for their size, and a big part of local conservation efforts.
400 years is plausible, as they do live a long time when left alone. =3
My fishing story - as a young teen, I "caught" a sturgeon on the Ottawa River (just outside of Pembroke) in a 12' aluminum boat. This was in an area where we'd typically expect to catch bass and northern pike - our fishing net was maybe the size of a large diner plate, and reeling the fish in might take a minute or two.
My father was in the boat with me. After hooking the fish, it took about 20 minutes before the fish was close enough that we could see it from the boat, and identified it as a sturgeon - it was the only time I'd ever caught one. This one was so much bigger than anything I'd caught before. I was using one of those jointed Rapala lures, and it had hooked the dorsal fin. I can confirm the sturgeon could definitely pull the two of us, and the boat, upstream - but not a great distance - just enough to move the boat around.
After about 25 minutes, my line snapped (it may have been 12 lbs test). We didn't really have a way of getting it in the boat in any case, and we would have released it anyway. This was probably the late 80s/early 90s - so nothing captured on a phone camera - it just lives on in my Dad's & my memories...
> lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea
To be fair, the towns you're talking about are barely 200-300 years or so I presume? Most other towns in the world are probably older than those towns, and maybe even the fish if it's just 400 years ago :)
To be fair the towns a North American might be talking about could easily date to 400 to 600 years ago at least - with signs of human occupation in the Great Lakes area going back 10-12,000 years before present, a good deal on the present lake floors.
The St. Croix River (as well as the Great Lakes) hosts Lake Sturgeon, not White Sturgeon. It’s part of the Mississippi River drainage basin.
Maybe just call them Lake America sturgeon and that should solve all their problems :-/
Why don't these fish die of cancer and old age sooner?
Better for the big picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huso_fulvescens Also, note the recent reclassification from Acipenser to Huso.
From the descriptions there, the article's estimate of 99% (reduction from historic population levels) is a severe underestimate.
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> I recently visited Lake America
Wonder wtf you were talking about: apparently the US has expanded on their threats to other's national sovereignty, I guess to the surprise of no one:
> Lake Ontario became the center of a geographical naming dispute when U.S. president Donald Trump issued an executive order directing U.S. federal agencies to refer to it as "Lake America" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario_naming_dispute
It's like a TV show, hilarious from the outside but I'm sure dire internally. Good luck y'all.
Nobody is calling it Lake America but prime idiots and Google. America isn't the US but a little over half of them are too dumb to figure that out.
If you were out of the loop, the South Park show also changed its name to South America, because this is the timeline we live in.
How does renaming a lake infringe on Canada’s sovereignty?
As far as I can tell, it hasn't been renamed, it's certain individuals and departments of the government that started referring to it as such. Things like that usually happens when the government is interested in making "subtle" threats to the nations surrounding the geographical they've "renamed". Lots of cases of this in history, the US didn't come up with this by themselves exactly.