SURGE OF THE STURGEON

Rex Burress

A fishing item in the M-R paper indicates “Sturgeon, America's forgotten dinosaurs,” are increasing in the Northeast U.S after nearly being depleted for their caviar eggs.

As “forgotten dinosaurs,” we could say they lived as far back as dinosaurs in the Triassic Age 245 million years ago, according to fossils, retaining some gigantic characteristics of animals in that time, and even today a Beluga sturgeon in the Volga estuary was caught in 1827, weighing 3,463 pounds and 24 feet long!

Among sturgeon giants, a 14-foot Atlantic Sturgeon was seen recently in New York's Hudson River, and White Sturgeon have been seen by divers who described them as 'small submarines,' spotted around Benica, California's stored 'Moth Ball Fleet' of war ships!'

The story of The Great Fish Catch in Oroville, CA's Feather River in 1910 is well known. Three fishermen in a boat hooked something that towed them around for 24 hours, until a giant, 287 pound, eight-foot white sturgeon was pulled out with a rope. Being an anadromous species, like salmon, they return to rivers from the salt-water sea to spawn, and tolerate fresh water but spend most of their long lives in salt and brackish water, returning to the sea after spawning. Their armored-looking scutes on their sides, give them a prehistoric living fossil appearance, a design that hasn't changed for about 200 million years.

When unimpeded by Oroville Dam, anadromous fish surged upstream as far as they could go to spawn, salmon reaching the Portola marshes and dying after spawning. The Oroville Giant Sturgeon of 1910 was in a deep hole in the bend where the Chinese Wall was built, now under the water of the Diversion Pool. The dam and a more shallow river than before the blockage has effected the sturgeon run, although a similar, smaller species—the Green Sturgeon— occasionally appears.

The unregulated slaughter of sturgeon from 1860 to 1901almost depleted the population's of the 27 species in the world, nine in U.S., until the season was closed in 1901. Over one and a half million pounds per year were being caught on the Pacific Coast. Conservation brought them back enough that a new limited, 'rod and reel' season was opened in 1954, allowing one, 40 inch fish per day, increased to 72 inches in 1992. To control populations, the length varies each year.

For all the muscle a sturgeon exhibits, they are bottom-feeders with no teeth, sucking encrustations, small fish, and the like, to nourish their oversized anatomy. But their longevity, both in present lifespan, and in the long, unchanged appearance through the ages, qualifies them as a living fossil. Their lifestyle seems to have been successful, but the U.S. population has never regained its former status, and strict conservation efforts in the Sacramento River barely keep pace with the times. Not only over-fishing and dams have interfered with progress, but sharp propellers of cargo ships kill many. Pollution is a never-ending peril, and rising water temperatures from climate change may have an effect.

Sturgeon, limited numbers of the green sturgeon, share the Feather River not only with the annual infusion of king salmon, but with carp, catfish, and small-mouth bass, once plentiful around Oroville until the dam was built that caused colder waters. The lagoon near Bedrock Park was churning with spawning carp in the spring before the water got cold, and I caught numerous bass in front of the Old Bathhouse/Nature Center.

Fish and Wildlife had fish-trap-samplers going in 2001-04 at Live Oak and Thermalito, and they totaled 29 species in three years, with oddities like lamprey, sculpin, and WAKASAGI [ Fishermen: Watch it!]

mixed in with bluegill and catfish types--13 species non-native and 16 native. About 40 species have been recorded previously.

Actually, primitive fish came before dinosaurs, evolving in the Devonian Age [the Age of Fishes]. Dinosaur fossils appeared in the Triassic Age about 245 mya, about the time of sturgeon.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

--Henry David Thoreau