Lake Sturgeon and the Detroit River - Historic Partners
Lake sturgeon, Goulais Bay, Lake Superior
by Kathy Warnes
Lake sturgeon and the Detroit River share a common sometimes tragic history of near death and a long, slow return to life.
Although lake sturgeon and the Detroit River aren’t exactly the same age, they are at least near contemporaries. The Detroit River flows through 345 million year old bedrock and lake sturgeon genealogy stretches to 100 million years ago. Lake sturgeon descend from a prehistoric fish that resemble fossils from the Upper Cretaceous Period of 100 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the Detroit River traces its ancestry to the Wisconsin Glacial Episode.
During the Wisconsin Glacial Episode of more than 10,000 years ago, glaciers covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, and New England. When the glaciers retreated, they left scour and melt water at their rims, melt water which created the Great Lakes. Between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair the glaciers carved out an enormous stretch of limestone and dolomite bedrock more than 345 million years old that sloped north from Grosse Isle, leaving pockets of loose sand with at least 100 feet of silt and clay. These glacial leftovers created the Detroit River.
Lake Sturgeon Family Secrets
Lake sturgeon or Acipenser fulvescens, one of 20 species of sturgeon, live in the Mississippi River, Hudson Bay, and Great Lakes basins and they are the largest native fresh water fish in their habitat. They are bottom feeders with a skeleton partially consisting of cartilage and skin with rows of bony plates. Sturgeon use their long shovel-shaped snouts to stir stand and silt on the beds of rivers and lakes while they are feeding. They usually have four barbels surrounding their mouth to help them sense and find their food.
Biologists consider lake sturgeon a near shore, warm water species, preferring water temperatures between mid50-low 70 degrees Fahrenheit and depths of 15 to 30 feet. Lake sturgeon can reach weights of up to 200 pounds and grow to be seven feet, with females developing longer and heavier than males. The rate of growth in lake sturgeon depends on temperature, the availability of food and water quality. They feed on insect larvae, crayfish, snails, clams, and leeches that they find along the bottom of lakes and rivers.
Many lake sturgeon make individual decisions about where they spend their time. Some of them remain in a small territories during the summer months, and others travel long distances to spend the summer. Adult sturgeons have been observed to intermix in the Great Lakes when they are not spawning, but they return to spawn in the streams where they were born, often traveling far up rivers in the spring.
Female sturgeon become sexually mature between 21 and 33 years, most often from 24 to 25 years and male sturgeon mature sexually between eight and 12 years, although sometimes as late as 22 years. Sturgeon spawn on clean gravel shoals and stream rapids from April through June, choosing water temperatures of 55 to 64 degrees Fahrenheit. A female lake surgeon can deposit from 4,000 to 7,000 eggs per pound of her weight. After they hatch, some lake sturgeon remain in the rivers where they are born for the first summer of their lives. The typical lifespan for lake sturgeon is 55 years for males and 70 to 100 years for females.
Lake Sturgeon and the Detroit River- A Shared History
When French and English settlers established ribbon farms bordering the Detroit River, they noted that there were so many sturgeon during the spring spawning that they could capsize fishing boats. Most nineteenth century sturgeon fishermen couldn’t imagine limits to the numbers of sturgeon that they took from the Detroit River if they bothered to imagine at all. Lake sturgeon seemed to flow as agelessly as the Detroit River itself. They had provided food for many Native American tribes including the Huron and the Wyandot.
Clarence Burton in his The City of Detroit Michigan, 1701-1922, wrote that up until 1888 the Detroit River front scenery consisted of fifteen miles of marsh and a few fishermen’s shanties. Muskrat and ducks watched the seasonal fishermen angling for sturgeon and the great ships passing back and forth between the
Upper and Lower lakes carrying freight and passengers.
Until about 1860, fishermen considered lake sturgeon trash fish and believed that their flesh and eggs had no commercial value. Fishermen routinely killed them because they often damaged commercial nets and threw them back into the River. Fishermen piled up lake sturgeon on shore to dry so they could burn them. They fed sturgeon to pigs, dug them into the earth as fertilizer and stacked them like cord wood to fuel steamboats.
Then slowly the demand for lake sturgeon steaks and lake sturgeon eggs to be made into caviar increased, and so did sturgeon fisheries. In 1880, sturgeon fisheries from the St. Clair River in the north down to northern Lake Erie in the south produced four million pounds of sturgeon and in 1889 the catch numbered more than 4,000 sturgeon.
Fox Island Fisheries
A Detroit Free Press story dated July 12, 1903, revealed the scope of the sturgeon fisheries in the Detroit River. In 1903, many fishermen named Fox Island, a small wooded island near the southern tip of Grosse Ile and the northern end of Bois Blanc, about a mile up the Detroit River from Sugar Island, the best sturgeon fishery in the United States. Every spring and summer hundreds of sturgeon weighing from 50 to 300 pounds each, were taken from the Detroit River and profitably sold, with some fishermen making as much as $100 a day.
In July 1903, there were three fishermen living on Fox Island, and several others scattered along the river, but in the spring at the height of the fishing season, at least 15 to 20 fishermen made Fox Island their headquarters. They lived in seven fishermen’s houses or shanties. On the American end of the Island, a little bay nestled and two of the houses faced the bay. The upper end of the island rose about a foot above water level, but at the downriver end a bluff about ten feet high ran about half the length of the island. Two of the shanties were located on the Canadian side of the island, along the face of the bluff. Several years before, workers on Fox Island had stored the dynamite used for the blasting operation on the Limekiln Crossing until it mysteriously exploded. Then workers thought it prudent to store the dynamite elsewhere.
Fox Island Sturgeon Fishing Required Special Skill
Fishermen did not use poles, lines, spears, or nets to catch sturgeon; instead, they had to use a special rigging consisting of a strong line often reaching 150 feet long which they stretched across the bottom of the river from two anchors. Ropes held the long line up from the bottom of the Detroit River by ropes which ran to the floats on the surface. Small anchors were tied by short ropes along the bottom line. The anchors held the long line to the bottom of the stream, and the floats held it up just enough to allow the hooks to touch the bottom. Across the line about a foot apart, the fishermen fastened scores of snubs or short lines, about two feet long. Each snub had a large needle pointed hook about three inches long and very strong fastened to it.
Instead of their mouths, sturgeon have a large opening on the underside of the head that they use to suck food from the bottom of rivers and streams. As the sturgeon swim along, the hooks catch in this opening and when they struggled to get free, they became entangled on the sharp prongs.
Each fisherman operated from one to one dozen big lines and examined them every morning to see how many sturgeon he had caught. Each fisherman used a boat to go to the floats and pulled them up. Even one big sturgeon on the line kept a fisherman busy and several fish kept him frantically active.
Passengers on steamers running to Sugar and Hickory Islands were accustomed to seeing miles of floats the size of paving blocks and set in rows to keep the sturgeon lines just at the bottom of the river. Visible for miles, the floats reached all the way from the middle of Grosse Ile to Lake Erie.
Before the United States government began deepening the Detroit River at Limekiln Crossing and using dynamite in its construction, hundreds of sturgeon were caught there and many were caught in the channel between Bois Blanc and the town of Amherstburg. Some of the old French settlers in Amherstburg spend a few weeks a year trying without too much success to catch sturgeon in their immediate neighborhood. Some fishermen also tried their luck between Bois Blanc and Sugar Island and as far into Lake Erie as Sandusky, Ohio, and others tried up the Detroit River near Peche Isle and Wolf’s Point.
Landing Sturgeon
A fisherman struggled to land a five foot long, 100 pound -or more- sturgeon propelled by determination to escape. The fisherman had to lift the fighting sturgeon into his boat which he did with large gaff hooks, which were short poles with heavy hooks fastened at one end. The gaff hooks were stuck into the sturgeon’s side through the tough skin, and the fisherman quickly lifted the sturgeon to the surface by pulling on the float ropes. He flopped the fish into the boat and often the fish floundered around beating with its powerful tail. Many fishermen usually hit a big sturgeon on the head with a mallet to stun it.
A sturgeon fresh from the depths of the Detroit River resembled a shark but presented a pretty picture, showing a brownish gray back with a bluish coat and a pearly white underside smooth as velvet without scales. Many fishermen took their sturgeon to a pound, a cage in the Detroit River, made of boards on the sides and bottom with enough space between them to allow the free passage of fresh water, but spaced closely enough to keep the sturgeon from escaping. They kept the sturgeon alive in the pound until a weekly sturgeon buyer arrived.
After the fishermen checked their sturgeon lines and made necessary repairs, then they would fish for pickerel and bass or lounge by their shanties smoking and talking. Five or ten years before, the fishermen usually had good luck and a big catch, but in 1903 sturgeon fishing as an occupation took only part of the year.
Taking Sturgeon to Market
The Fox Island fishermen and others along the Detroit River sold their sturgeon to buyers from Detroit for about $11.00 each, no matter what the size. Many of the sturgeon weighed more than 100 pounds, enabling the seller to make a tidy profit. Sturgeon provided sturgeon steaks, a high priced luxury that topped many banquet menus.
A one hundred pound sturgeon generally yielded 25 pounds of eggs that were made into caviar, another luxury dish that was especially popular with rich people in the east and in Russia and Germany. Sturgeon eggs were packed in common salt and worth about 25 cents a pound, but after they were pickled for the table, they sold for much more money. As far as Detroiters were concerned, the Detroit River sturgeon provided the best sturgeon steaks and the best caviar in the world.
Sturgeon sounds or bladders that were formerly thrown away were sold at wholesale for $1.25 a pound. From 20-25 sounds weighed a pound and they were used in purifying wines and whiskies.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Detroit served as the center for sturgeon buying and selling. Hundreds of Detroiters remembered when sturgeon were peddled on the streets for four cents a pound and the eggs and bladders thrown away. By 1903, so many sturgeon had been taken from the Great Lakes and the rivers emptying into them that their numbers drastically declined. The price for sturgeon rose to 30 cents a pound and the eggs were made into caviar that sold at retail for $1.25 per pound can.
The Detroit River and the Sturgeon : Used up and Thrown Away?
After decades of fishing, so many individual fishermen and fisheries took so many sturgeon that they quickly decimated the lake sturgeon population. In 1895 the lake sturgeon harvest numbered over 2.3 million kilograms, but by 1905, the number had fallen to less than 0.45 million kilograms. Pollution from growing lumber and steel industries along the Detroit River and development that destroyed their habitat also helped decimate the Detroit River lake sturgeon population. The slow reproductive cycle of sturgeon also worked against them. Most individual sturgeon caught before they reach twenty years old have never bred and females spawn only once every four or five years. Harvesting of breeding females for their roe also damaged population size. Few modern sturgeon reached the extreme old age or large size that their ancestors achieved.
Lake sturgeon populations throughout the Great Lakes have not recovered from decades of exploitation and they are estimated to be at less than one percent of their former abundance. Michigan, as well as 19 of the 20 states within their original range, lists lake sturgeon as a threatened species.
Lake Sturgeon and Detroit River Revival
With millions of years of survival behind them, sturgeons have reached the endangered, but not the extinct stage of their lives. Beginning in the 1970s, lake sturgeon did not spawn in the Detroit River because of pollution, overfishing and habitat loss, but in the early decades of the twenty first century, lake sturgeon are again spring spawning in the Detroit River.
In 1997, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources formulated Michigan’s first lake sturgeon rehabilitation plan that identified spawning places and information on seasonal movements and habitat use, but the lack of current data on Great Lakes sturgeon stocks has hindered rehabilitation efforts.
In the spring and summer of 2000 and 2001, researchers implanted transmitters to track ten adult lake sturgeon, evaluate their habitat use, and identify possible spawning sites. The researchers verified one spawning site in the Detroit River by recovering sturgeon eggs deposited on egg collection mats anchored at the site. They used telemetry data to locate several other possible spawning sites.
An April 2010 story in the Detroit News sounded hope for a lake sturgeon come back in the Detroit River. For the last four decades, environmental laws have targeted and reduced many pollutants in the Detroit River -- oil, phosphorous, chlorides, mercury, PCBs and municipal waste-- and once again, birds like ospreys and eagles and fish like lake sturgeon are increasing in numbers.
According to John Hartig, manager of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge on Grosse Ile, “This is clearly one of the most unique ecological recovery stories in North American history. If you look at how polluted we were…holy cow, have we come a long way.” He hastens to add that there is much more to be accomplished in rejuvenating the Detroit River and the lake sturgeon, but the effort is ongoing.
Fishing for lake sturgeon has not yet been restored in Michigan. With a few strict exceptions, federal laws forbid sport angles from keeping lake sturgeon, but the fact that now there are lake sturgeon to protect is a positive sign of their revival in the Detroit River.
Habitat restoration is an essential part of the revival of lake sturgeon. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Service and the Essex (Canada) Conservation Authority worked together on the first bi-national lake sturgeon habitat restoration project on the Detroit River. They built spawning beds at the north end of Fighting Island.
In 2012, Michigan organizations and government agencies including the Michigan Sea Grant team and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources built nine fieldstone and limestone underwater reefs in the Middle Channel of the St. Clair River to give lake sturgeon more spawning grounds. The Middle Channel supports one of the largest remaining populations of lake sturgeon in the Great Lakes.
Justin Chiotti, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, another agency involved in the reef projects, estimates that there are about 30,000 adult lake sturgeon at the Blue Water Bridge where Lake Huron flows into the St. Clair River, about 15,000 lake sturgeon in the Middle Channel of the St. Clair River, and 3,000 to 5,000 in the Detroit River.
As long as the Detroit River continues to keep the revival pace with the lake sturgeon, people in the twenty second century and hopefully beyond will enjoy these prehistoric Michigan natives.
References
St. Clair-Detroit River Sturgeon for Tomorrow
Enhanced Native Fish Reproduction in the Detroit River
Habitat Recovery for Lake Sturgeon on the Detroit River
Lake Sturgeon Spawning Reefs Making a Difference in Southeast Michigan
Department of Natural Resources, History of Lake Sturgeon in Michigan
U.S. Great Lakes Science Center – Lake Sturgeon, Dinosaur of the Great Lakes
Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge Comprehensive Plan
Detroit Free Press, July 12, 1903. Fox Island Fisheries
Auer, Nancy, editor and Dempsey, Dave, editor. The Great Lake Sturgeon. Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Harkness, William John Knox, Dymond, John Richardson, Ontario, Fish and Wildlife Branch. The Lake Sturgeon: the history of its fishery and problems of conservation. Fish & wildlife Branch, Ontario Dept. of Lands and Forests, 1961. Digitized March 20, 2009.
LeGreton, G.T.O., editor, Beamish, F. William H., editor, McKinely, Scott R., editor. Sturgeons and Paddlefish of North America (Fish & Fisheries Series), Springer, 2004.
Lake sturgeon and the Detroit River share a common sometimes tragic history of near death and a long, slow return to life.
Although lake sturgeon and the Detroit River aren’t exactly the same age, they are at least near contemporaries. The Detroit River flows through 345 million year old bedrock and lake sturgeon genealogy stretches to 100 million years ago. Lake sturgeon descend from a prehistoric fish that resemble fossils from the Upper Cretaceous Period of 100 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the Detroit River traces its ancestry to the Wisconsin Glacial Episode.
During the Wisconsin Glacial Episode of more than 10,000 years ago, glaciers covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, and New England. When the glaciers retreated, they left scour and melt water at their rims, melt water which created the Great Lakes. Between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair the glaciers carved out an enormous stretch of limestone and dolomite bedrock more than 345 million years old that sloped north from Grosse Isle, leaving pockets of loose sand with at least 100 feet of silt and clay. These glacial leftovers created the Detroit River.
Lake Sturgeon Family Secrets
Lake sturgeon or Acipenser fulvescens, one of 20 species of sturgeon, live in the Mississippi River, Hudson Bay, and Great Lakes basins and they are the largest native fresh water fish in their habitat. They are bottom feeders with a skeleton partially consisting of cartilage and skin with rows of bony plates. Sturgeon use their long shovel-shaped snouts to stir stand and silt on the beds of rivers and lakes while they are feeding. They usually have four barbels surrounding their mouth to help them sense and find their food.
Biologists consider lake sturgeon a near shore, warm water species, preferring water temperatures between mid50-low 70 degrees Fahrenheit and depths of 15 to 30 feet. Lake sturgeon can reach weights of up to 200 pounds and grow to be seven feet, with females developing longer and heavier than males. The rate of growth in lake sturgeon depends on temperature, the availability of food and water quality. They feed on insect larvae, crayfish, snails, clams, and leeches that they find along the bottom of lakes and rivers.
Many lake sturgeon make individual decisions about where they spend their time. Some of them remain in a small territories during the summer months, and others travel long distances to spend the summer. Adult sturgeons have been observed to intermix in the Great Lakes when they are not spawning, but they return to spawn in the streams where they were born, often traveling far up rivers in the spring.
Female sturgeon become sexually mature between 21 and 33 years, most often from 24 to 25 years and male sturgeon mature sexually between eight and 12 years, although sometimes as late as 22 years. Sturgeon spawn on clean gravel shoals and stream rapids from April through June, choosing water temperatures of 55 to 64 degrees Fahrenheit. A female lake surgeon can deposit from 4,000 to 7,000 eggs per pound of her weight. After they hatch, some lake sturgeon remain in the rivers where they are born for the first summer of their lives. The typical lifespan for lake sturgeon is 55 years for males and 70 to 100 years for females.
Lake Sturgeon and the Detroit River- A Shared History
When French and English settlers established ribbon farms bordering the Detroit River, they noted that there were so many sturgeon during the spring spawning that they could capsize fishing boats. Most nineteenth century sturgeon fishermen couldn’t imagine limits to the numbers of sturgeon that they took from the Detroit River if they bothered to imagine at all. Lake sturgeon seemed to flow as agelessly as the Detroit River itself. They had provided food for many Native American tribes including the Huron and the Wyandot.
Clarence Burton in his The City of Detroit Michigan, 1701-1922, wrote that up until 1888 the Detroit River front scenery consisted of fifteen miles of marsh and a few fishermen’s shanties. Muskrat and ducks watched the seasonal fishermen angling for sturgeon and the great ships passing back and forth between the
Upper and Lower lakes carrying freight and passengers.
Until about 1860, fishermen considered lake sturgeon trash fish and believed that their flesh and eggs had no commercial value. Fishermen routinely killed them because they often damaged commercial nets and threw them back into the River. Fishermen piled up lake sturgeon on shore to dry so they could burn them. They fed sturgeon to pigs, dug them into the earth as fertilizer and stacked them like cord wood to fuel steamboats.
Then slowly the demand for lake sturgeon steaks and lake sturgeon eggs to be made into caviar increased, and so did sturgeon fisheries. In 1880, sturgeon fisheries from the St. Clair River in the north down to northern Lake Erie in the south produced four million pounds of sturgeon and in 1889 the catch numbered more than 4,000 sturgeon.
Fox Island Fisheries
A Detroit Free Press story dated July 12, 1903, revealed the scope of the sturgeon fisheries in the Detroit River. In 1903, many fishermen named Fox Island, a small wooded island near the southern tip of Grosse Ile and the northern end of Bois Blanc, about a mile up the Detroit River from Sugar Island, the best sturgeon fishery in the United States. Every spring and summer hundreds of sturgeon weighing from 50 to 300 pounds each, were taken from the Detroit River and profitably sold, with some fishermen making as much as $100 a day.
In July 1903, there were three fishermen living on Fox Island, and several others scattered along the river, but in the spring at the height of the fishing season, at least 15 to 20 fishermen made Fox Island their headquarters. They lived in seven fishermen’s houses or shanties. On the American end of the Island, a little bay nestled and two of the houses faced the bay. The upper end of the island rose about a foot above water level, but at the downriver end a bluff about ten feet high ran about half the length of the island. Two of the shanties were located on the Canadian side of the island, along the face of the bluff. Several years before, workers on Fox Island had stored the dynamite used for the blasting operation on the Limekiln Crossing until it mysteriously exploded. Then workers thought it prudent to store the dynamite elsewhere.
Fox Island Sturgeon Fishing Required Special Skill
Fishermen did not use poles, lines, spears, or nets to catch sturgeon; instead, they had to use a special rigging consisting of a strong line often reaching 150 feet long which they stretched across the bottom of the river from two anchors. Ropes held the long line up from the bottom of the Detroit River by ropes which ran to the floats on the surface. Small anchors were tied by short ropes along the bottom line. The anchors held the long line to the bottom of the stream, and the floats held it up just enough to allow the hooks to touch the bottom. Across the line about a foot apart, the fishermen fastened scores of snubs or short lines, about two feet long. Each snub had a large needle pointed hook about three inches long and very strong fastened to it.
Instead of their mouths, sturgeon have a large opening on the underside of the head that they use to suck food from the bottom of rivers and streams. As the sturgeon swim along, the hooks catch in this opening and when they struggled to get free, they became entangled on the sharp prongs.
Each fisherman operated from one to one dozen big lines and examined them every morning to see how many sturgeon he had caught. Each fisherman used a boat to go to the floats and pulled them up. Even one big sturgeon on the line kept a fisherman busy and several fish kept him frantically active.
Passengers on steamers running to Sugar and Hickory Islands were accustomed to seeing miles of floats the size of paving blocks and set in rows to keep the sturgeon lines just at the bottom of the river. Visible for miles, the floats reached all the way from the middle of Grosse Ile to Lake Erie.
Before the United States government began deepening the Detroit River at Limekiln Crossing and using dynamite in its construction, hundreds of sturgeon were caught there and many were caught in the channel between Bois Blanc and the town of Amherstburg. Some of the old French settlers in Amherstburg spend a few weeks a year trying without too much success to catch sturgeon in their immediate neighborhood. Some fishermen also tried their luck between Bois Blanc and Sugar Island and as far into Lake Erie as Sandusky, Ohio, and others tried up the Detroit River near Peche Isle and Wolf’s Point.
Landing Sturgeon
A fisherman struggled to land a five foot long, 100 pound -or more- sturgeon propelled by determination to escape. The fisherman had to lift the fighting sturgeon into his boat which he did with large gaff hooks, which were short poles with heavy hooks fastened at one end. The gaff hooks were stuck into the sturgeon’s side through the tough skin, and the fisherman quickly lifted the sturgeon to the surface by pulling on the float ropes. He flopped the fish into the boat and often the fish floundered around beating with its powerful tail. Many fishermen usually hit a big sturgeon on the head with a mallet to stun it.
A sturgeon fresh from the depths of the Detroit River resembled a shark but presented a pretty picture, showing a brownish gray back with a bluish coat and a pearly white underside smooth as velvet without scales. Many fishermen took their sturgeon to a pound, a cage in the Detroit River, made of boards on the sides and bottom with enough space between them to allow the free passage of fresh water, but spaced closely enough to keep the sturgeon from escaping. They kept the sturgeon alive in the pound until a weekly sturgeon buyer arrived.
After the fishermen checked their sturgeon lines and made necessary repairs, then they would fish for pickerel and bass or lounge by their shanties smoking and talking. Five or ten years before, the fishermen usually had good luck and a big catch, but in 1903 sturgeon fishing as an occupation took only part of the year.
Taking Sturgeon to Market
The Fox Island fishermen and others along the Detroit River sold their sturgeon to buyers from Detroit for about $11.00 each, no matter what the size. Many of the sturgeon weighed more than 100 pounds, enabling the seller to make a tidy profit. Sturgeon provided sturgeon steaks, a high priced luxury that topped many banquet menus.
A one hundred pound sturgeon generally yielded 25 pounds of eggs that were made into caviar, another luxury dish that was especially popular with rich people in the east and in Russia and Germany. Sturgeon eggs were packed in common salt and worth about 25 cents a pound, but after they were pickled for the table, they sold for much more money. As far as Detroiters were concerned, the Detroit River sturgeon provided the best sturgeon steaks and the best caviar in the world.
Sturgeon sounds or bladders that were formerly thrown away were sold at wholesale for $1.25 a pound. From 20-25 sounds weighed a pound and they were used in purifying wines and whiskies.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Detroit served as the center for sturgeon buying and selling. Hundreds of Detroiters remembered when sturgeon were peddled on the streets for four cents a pound and the eggs and bladders thrown away. By 1903, so many sturgeon had been taken from the Great Lakes and the rivers emptying into them that their numbers drastically declined. The price for sturgeon rose to 30 cents a pound and the eggs were made into caviar that sold at retail for $1.25 per pound can.
The Detroit River and the Sturgeon : Used up and Thrown Away?
After decades of fishing, so many individual fishermen and fisheries took so many sturgeon that they quickly decimated the lake sturgeon population. In 1895 the lake sturgeon harvest numbered over 2.3 million kilograms, but by 1905, the number had fallen to less than 0.45 million kilograms. Pollution from growing lumber and steel industries along the Detroit River and development that destroyed their habitat also helped decimate the Detroit River lake sturgeon population. The slow reproductive cycle of sturgeon also worked against them. Most individual sturgeon caught before they reach twenty years old have never bred and females spawn only once every four or five years. Harvesting of breeding females for their roe also damaged population size. Few modern sturgeon reached the extreme old age or large size that their ancestors achieved.
Lake sturgeon populations throughout the Great Lakes have not recovered from decades of exploitation and they are estimated to be at less than one percent of their former abundance. Michigan, as well as 19 of the 20 states within their original range, lists lake sturgeon as a threatened species.
Lake Sturgeon and Detroit River Revival
With millions of years of survival behind them, sturgeons have reached the endangered, but not the extinct stage of their lives. Beginning in the 1970s, lake sturgeon did not spawn in the Detroit River because of pollution, overfishing and habitat loss, but in the early decades of the twenty first century, lake sturgeon are again spring spawning in the Detroit River.
In 1997, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources formulated Michigan’s first lake sturgeon rehabilitation plan that identified spawning places and information on seasonal movements and habitat use, but the lack of current data on Great Lakes sturgeon stocks has hindered rehabilitation efforts.
In the spring and summer of 2000 and 2001, researchers implanted transmitters to track ten adult lake sturgeon, evaluate their habitat use, and identify possible spawning sites. The researchers verified one spawning site in the Detroit River by recovering sturgeon eggs deposited on egg collection mats anchored at the site. They used telemetry data to locate several other possible spawning sites.
An April 2010 story in the Detroit News sounded hope for a lake sturgeon come back in the Detroit River. For the last four decades, environmental laws have targeted and reduced many pollutants in the Detroit River -- oil, phosphorous, chlorides, mercury, PCBs and municipal waste-- and once again, birds like ospreys and eagles and fish like lake sturgeon are increasing in numbers.
According to John Hartig, manager of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge on Grosse Ile, “This is clearly one of the most unique ecological recovery stories in North American history. If you look at how polluted we were…holy cow, have we come a long way.” He hastens to add that there is much more to be accomplished in rejuvenating the Detroit River and the lake sturgeon, but the effort is ongoing.
Fishing for lake sturgeon has not yet been restored in Michigan. With a few strict exceptions, federal laws forbid sport angles from keeping lake sturgeon, but the fact that now there are lake sturgeon to protect is a positive sign of their revival in the Detroit River.
Habitat restoration is an essential part of the revival of lake sturgeon. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Service and the Essex (Canada) Conservation Authority worked together on the first bi-national lake sturgeon habitat restoration project on the Detroit River. They built spawning beds at the north end of Fighting Island.
In 2012, Michigan organizations and government agencies including the Michigan Sea Grant team and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources built nine fieldstone and limestone underwater reefs in the Middle Channel of the St. Clair River to give lake sturgeon more spawning grounds. The Middle Channel supports one of the largest remaining populations of lake sturgeon in the Great Lakes.
Justin Chiotti, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, another agency involved in the reef projects, estimates that there are about 30,000 adult lake sturgeon at the Blue Water Bridge where Lake Huron flows into the St. Clair River, about 15,000 lake sturgeon in the Middle Channel of the St. Clair River, and 3,000 to 5,000 in the Detroit River.
As long as the Detroit River continues to keep the revival pace with the lake sturgeon, people in the twenty second century and hopefully beyond will enjoy these prehistoric Michigan natives.
References
St. Clair-Detroit River Sturgeon for Tomorrow
Enhanced Native Fish Reproduction in the Detroit River
Habitat Recovery for Lake Sturgeon on the Detroit River
Lake Sturgeon Spawning Reefs Making a Difference in Southeast Michigan
Department of Natural Resources, History of Lake Sturgeon in Michigan
U.S. Great Lakes Science Center – Lake Sturgeon, Dinosaur of the Great Lakes
Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge Comprehensive Plan
Detroit Free Press, July 12, 1903. Fox Island Fisheries
Auer, Nancy, editor and Dempsey, Dave, editor. The Great Lake Sturgeon. Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Harkness, William John Knox, Dymond, John Richardson, Ontario, Fish and Wildlife Branch. The Lake Sturgeon: the history of its fishery and problems of conservation. Fish & wildlife Branch, Ontario Dept. of Lands and Forests, 1961. Digitized March 20, 2009.
LeGreton, G.T.O., editor, Beamish, F. William H., editor, McKinely, Scott R., editor. Sturgeons and Paddlefish of North America (Fish & Fisheries Series), Springer, 2004.