Imagine an animal who has been around since the Triassic Period, a fish who swam in the freshwater lakes and rivers of Pangea, even before T. Rex was scaring the bejesus out of Triceratops. This magnificent fish made it all the way to the 1950’s, only to be eradicated from Kentucky’s waterways by the uncivilization of humans.
In Kentucky, the lake sturgeon’s habitat included the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland drainages. More of that in a bit. First let’s talk characteristics.
The lake sturgeon is known as an ancient, primitive, fish because it’s changed very little from the earliest fossil records. Its long, slender body has smooth skin and is lined on sides, back and belly with bony plates called scutes. With a long toothless snout it stirs up the sediment on the river bottom, disturbing hapless invertebrates which it then hoovers up and swallows whole. Four “whiskers” called barbels dangle from its chin: covered in taste buds, they help locate these healthy morsels.
Full-grown sturgeons can reach up to 7 feet in length and weigh as much as 300 pounds. Males can live, left to their own devices, up to 60 years and females up to 150 years. In no rush, these late maturing fish don’t spawn every year. The females lay eggs every four to eight years, while the males fertilize every two to four years. Even though a female can lay 700,000 eggs or so, this lackadaisical approach does not lend itself to overpopulation.
Sadly, there has been an onslaught of causes for the demise of lake sturgeon in Kentucky. In the beginning they were despised because they tore up fishing gear. They were fed to pigs, used to fuel steamboats(!), killed and dumped back in the water because, why not? Then someone realized the flesh and roe were delicious and they were subsequently killed in even more ferocious numbers. Adding insult to injury, their habitat and spawning grounds have been destroyed by pollution, dams, channelization and siltation.
Fortunately though, they, and we, are not without hope. In 2007 the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources began a project to create a self-sustaining population. They started in the same location where the last known lake sturgeon was caught in Kentucky in 1957: Lake Cumberland. Lake sturgeon from the Mississippi River have their eggs fertilized in Wisconsin, then are sent down here to the Pfeiffer Fish Hatchery in Frankfort. A total of 20,000 juveniles have been released. It’s not a project for the impatient, since it takes 15 to 20 years for them to begin reproducing.
It is also now illegal to catch and not release a lake sturgeon. Alive.
Fingers crossed, and with a prayer from the Sturgeon Clan of the Menominee nation, we will have these fantastic beings on this earth for the next 250,000,000 years.
Words and image by Terry King