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In search of the sturgeon

It's been a long time since anyone has seen lake sturgeon in the Sturgeon River. Jim Greer of the Pioneer Gun Club says he saw one in Big Lake around 1930. "I was out with my dad, and he was rowing the boat and I was hanging over the front.

It's been a long time since anyone has seen lake sturgeon in the Sturgeon River.

Jim Greer of the Pioneer Gun Club says he saw one in Big Lake around 1930. "I was out with my dad, and he was rowing the boat and I was hanging over the front." They floated towards what he thought was a five-foot-long log, and he poked it with a stick. The log swam away.

"I'd never seen a fish that big before," he says. He didn't know it at the time, but that was a lake sturgeon — the only fish in Alberta that gets that big.

It's been more than a century since the last recorded sighting of a lake sturgeon in the Sturgeon River. This massive fish has survived dinosaurs and ice ages, but may have met its match when it comes to us: they have virtually vanished from most of Canada, and it's mostly our fault.

Looking for dinosaurs

Daryl Watters is trying to bring them back.

The provincial fisheries technician powers down the North Saskatchewan River north of Fort Saskatchewan in a motorboat on a hot, sunny day. Trees and spray whip past, as does a white pelican, which briefly tries to race him.

Watters, 57, loves lake sturgeon. He says he first got hooked on them in 1990 when he got a 20-kilogram one on his line. "I've fished Alberta since I was four, [and] that was the first fish I ever caught that I thought could beat me."

The province used to think there were few, if any, lake sturgeon left in the North Saskatchewan, Watters says. Then, in 1990, a local angler called and said he'd caught 15 there that summer. That led him and a small group of volunteers to do a more detailed survey of sturgeon in the river — a survey that's now in its 20th year.

Watters and his partner Janet Boyd drop anchor at a secret sturgeon spot on the river. Here, they try and catch and tag some of the 1,500 lake sturgeons thought to be in the North Saskatchewan in order to track their number and find their breeding grounds. They spread nets, cast lines and wait.

One weird fish

Lake sturgeons are the largest freshwater fish in Alberta, Watters says. "If you catch a fish that's five feet long, it's a sturgeon." They're also some of the oldest, with at least one known to have lived for 150 years.

Lake sturgeon resemble a cross between a catfish, shark and the Red October. The fish are torpedo-shaped, with an olive-gray top and a white belly. Each has a shark-like tail, a long snout and a small opening behind each eye called a spiracle — thought to be a remnant of a gill opening in ancient fish.

Unlike most fish, lake sturgeons have five rows of bony plates called scutes instead of scales. The plates are razor sharp in young sturgeon, which protects them from predators and makes them look like saws with fins. They dull with age, but by the time they do, the fish are too big to eat.

Lake sturgeons are bottom feeders, Watters says, and eat pretty much anything they find. Four barbels on their chin drag through the muck to sniff out food. When the fish find some, they extend their tube-like mouths from the bottom of their chins and suck it up.

"Oh my God!" Boyd says, as something splashes behind Watters.

"That's a sturgeon right there," he says. Lake sturgeons sometimes leap out of the water for no apparent reason, he explains. They could be mating, communicating or even body-slamming other fish. "Perhaps they're just doing it because they can."

"Perhaps they're just taunting you," Boyd jokes.

And that's just one example of their strange behaviour, says Gary Anderson, a biologist who studies lake sturgeon at the University of Manitoba. The fish have been seen swimming backwards with their heads above water like a dolphin, for example. "We have no idea why they do that." Others have seen them swimming upside down.

"The thing with sturgeon," Watters says, "is there's so many questions and so many theories on why they do what they do." He moves the boat over to the jumping sturgeon, hoping for better luck.

Hunted to extinction

Lake sturgeon used to be common in Canada, say historians. Joseph Nelson, author of The Fishes of Alberta, notes that ones weighing 10 kilograms were caught in the Sturgeon River as late as 1872.

European settlers saw them as a nuisance — they were so huge they wrecked their nets. "You hear stories of lake sturgeon being used as cordwood they were so abundant," Anderson says.

But that changed in the 1860s when the smoked fish market took off. Mass overfishing resulted, with commercial fisheries reeling in millions of kilograms of sturgeon each year.

The result was the complete or near extermination of lake sturgeon in many parts of Canada, according to the federal government. The fish is now considered threatened in Alberta and has been recommended for endangered status nationally.

The lake sturgeon's longevity has worked against it, says Paul Bentzen, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University. It takes 25 years for the fish to reach sexual maturity, and they only spawn once every five years. "That makes them very vulnerable to exploitation by humans," he says. "Once you've removed all those big, old fish, you've knocked [the population] way down."

Encouraging signs

Two-and-a-half hours later, Watters and Boyd check their nets. They're in luck — nabbing two lake sturgeon, each about a metre long.

Watters puts each in a water-filled trough. The first comes quietly. The second rages and splashes the whole boat. "Well, that's refreshing!" he quips.

Each fish is measured, weighed and tagged. One tag is a fluorescent orange tube with a code on it that's punched through the dorsal fin. If an angler catches this fish, Watters explains, they're supposed to call Fish and Wildlife and report its code, weight, length and location before letting it go. He also injects a radio transponder tag into the fish — a backup ID in case the orange one falls out.

Watters takes a one-centimetre chunk from the fish's pectoral fin to determine its age (you read it like the rings of a tree). Then he gently hoists the giant back into the water, where it vanishes into the deep.

The number of sturgeon in the North Saskatchewan has stayed about the same since 1990, Watters's research suggests, as has their age distribution: lots of kids, few adults. It also shows that whole generations of the fish are missing. "Because that one generation is 80 to 100 years, we may still be feeling the effects of overfishing from 50 to 80 years ago."

It would be reprehensible for us to let this fish vanish, Watters argues. "These are fish that have been around for 65 million years," he says, living through dinosaurs and ice ages largely unchanged. "They've survived all that, and they're having trouble because of man's influence."

Watters is one of several people working on a provincial recovery plan for lake sturgeon, one that could close some parts of the river to development to protect fish habitat.

We can bring back lake sturgeon. Manitoba has had a major research and restocking program in place since the 1990s, says Manitoba Hydro environmental specialist Shelley Matkowski, one that seems to be helping populations in the Nelson and Assiniboine Rivers. "We now have sturgeon in the Assiniboine that are five feet long," she says — a huge success, since they used to be extinct there.

It will be generations before we see lake sturgeon in any great number in Canada again, Watters says. "The thing with sturgeon research is you'll die before you see the end of your study."

He personally plans to keep studying the fish long into retirement. "I love these fish," he says. "All the recaptured [ones] have got my lip marks on top of their head."


Kevin Ma

About the Author: Kevin Ma

Kevin Ma joined the St. Albert Gazette in 2006. He writes about Sturgeon County, education, the environment, agriculture, science and aboriginal affairs. He also contributes features, photographs and video.
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