A year after scientists started reintroducing lake sturgeon to the Cuyahoga and Sandusky rivers, the primitive fish are showing signs of a comeback.
Sturgeon have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and they would fit right into the Jurassic period: The fish can grow to be 6 feet long, weigh over 100 pounds and live to be 400 years old.
Once plentiful in the Great Lakes, they were nearly wiped out by the early 1900s when overharvest and dam construction reduced their numbers to an estimated 1% of their past prevalence.
Now scientists are trying to reestablish a population in Lake Erie, and there are signs their efforts are working.
The ‘elephants’ of the Great Lakes
Eric Weimer, a fisheries biologist supervisor with the Ohio Division of Wildlife, compares lake sturgeon in the Great Lakes to elephants in the African savanna.
“Sturgeon are our charismatic megafauna,” he said. “And so there's a lot of interest in restoring this native species.”
In 2018, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources joined forces with organizations like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Toledo Zoo to reintroduce lake sturgeon to the Maumee River.
The northwest Ohio waterway feeds Lake Erie, and historically, small populations of sturgeon spawned there. Weimer says those fish disappeared a long time ago.
“We’re trying to give them a kickstart,” he said, first by ensuring the water is clean enough to sustain a sturgeon population and then by stocking the site with thousands of 6-inch-long juvenile fish every year.
So far, it appears those fish aren’t just surviving — they’re growing.
“Within the first year or so, we saw a marked uptick in the number of lake sturgeon that are being caught incidentally out in Lake Erie,” Weimer said.
And because those fish are marked with PIT tags – which contain the same technology used to microchip dogs and cats – scientists can trace many of these catches back to Maumee River stocking that began in 2018.
From the Maumee to the Cuyahoga River and beyond
Since their success in the Maumee River, scientists have expanded their sturgeon reintroduction efforts to include additional Lake Erie tributaries. Last year, they released tiny lake sturgeon into the Cuyahoga and Sandusky rivers too.
And this year, they added another waterway into the mix: the Scioto River, which feeds into the Ohio River and also historically boasted a population of lake sturgeon.
Weimer is hopeful the fish will eventually reproduce on their own, but that will take a while: Female lake sturgeon reach sexual maturity when they’re about 25 years old.
“It's a 25-year commitment at each of the places because it takes so long to build an adult population before we even know if they're going to spawn themselves and sustain themselves,” Weimer said. “We don't want to stock sturgeon for the next 200 years. We want to stock sturgeon for 25 years and then have them take care of themselves.”
