Those sturgeon fingerlings are pretty cute!
Oh, cool!
I didn’t know until I read the article they can live to 100 years. Wow.
Locally extinct, although overall endangered. This isn’t some sort of species-necromancy process.
The babies are sort of cute!
that is a nifty looking fish. i hope they do well.
Yeah, the more correct (but much less common) word is “extripated”
Are sturgeon good to eat? Did they get extirpated from overfishing, or from pollution, or something else?
All of the above.
These fish were once killed as a nuisance by catch because they damaged fishing gear. When their meat and eggs became prized, commercial fishermen targeted them. Between 1879 and 1900, the Great Lakes commercial sturgeon fishery brought in an average of 4 million pounds (1,800 t) per year. Such unsustainable catch rates were coupled with environmental challenges, such as pollution and the construction of dams and other flood control measures. Sturgeon, which return each spring to spawn in the streams and rivers in which they were born, found tributaries blocked and spawning shoals destroyed by silt from agriculture and lumbering. In the 20th century, drastic drops in sturgeon catches, increased regulations, and the closure of viable fisheries occurred. Currently, 19 of the 20 states within the fish’s original U.S. range list it as either threatened or endangered.[20][21] It is considered “Vulnerable” by NatureServe.[4]
This sturgeon is a valuable gourmet food fish, as well as a source of specialty products including caviar and isinglass. “In 1860, this species, taken on incidental catches of other fishes, was killed and dumped back in the lake, piled up on shore to dry and be burned, fed to pigs, or dug into the earth as fertilizer.”[22] It was even stacked like cordwood and used to fuel steamboats. Once its value was realized, “They were taken by every available means from spearing and jigging to set lines of baited or unbaited hooks laid on the bottom to trap nets, pound nets and gillnets.”[22] Over 5 million lb were taken from Lake Erie in a single year. The fishery collapsed, largely by 1900. It has never recovered. Like most sturgeons, the lake sturgeon is rare now and is protected in many areas.[20][21]
In addition to overharvesting, it has also been negatively affected by pollution and loss of migratory waterways. It is vulnerable to population declines through overfishing due to its extremely slow reproductive cycle; most individuals caught before 20 years of age have never bred and females spawn only once every four or five years. The specific harvesting of breeding females for their roe is also damaging to population size. Few individuals ever reach the extreme old age or large size that those of previous generations often did.[23]
Yeah, thanks for googling that for me.