Photo from the Fish and Wildlife Service Office
End of last month, a biologist working off of Michigan-based Fish and Wildlife Service Office went to Detroit River with his crews to survey the lake sturgeon population. The team put out set-lines with hooks to catch fishes, searched for eggs, and larvae but instead caught a huge sturgeon measuring 7 feet long, at least 240 pounds, indicating that it was an almost 100-year-old female sturgeon.
It is the largest lake sturgeon ever recorded in the country. According to the Facebook posting of Alpena Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, the sturgeon is a “once in a lifetime catch,” and “likely hatched in the Detroit River around 1920, when Detroit became the 4th largest city in America.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife team weighed the fish, measured the fish, put a chip into the fish, and after processing all their work, released her to the water. The current sturgeon population is 7,000 but was once near a million when Detroit was a booming city in the early 1920s and on.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service annually reports the sturgeon population at the St. Clair-Detroit River system to better understand the lake sturgeon population began in 2001. The lake sturgeon, considered a threatened species in Michigan, has endured a lot — from a boom in commercial fishing that continued into the early 1900s, periods of over-harvesting, and habitat loss driven by shipping channel construction and the damming of tributaries. All of that contributed to declines in population, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
