Atlantic sturgeon co-existed with dinosaurs – and they look like it. They can grow up to 14 feet long, weigh over 800 pounds, and have armor-like plates protruding from much of their body. They can also live up to 60 years of age. But modern times have not been kind to this unique fish. And so last month I filed a petition with the federal government to place the Atlantic sturgeon on its list of endangered species.
Atlantic sturgeon once spawned in dozens of rivers from Maine to Florida. Their numbers reached tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands in some rivers. Today, however, spawning populations in nine U.S. rivers have gone extinct. Most of the remaining rivers have populations so depleted that their numbers cannot be reliably estimated and their present day survival is in question. The Delaware River, once home to the largest Atlantic sturgeon population in the U.S., with an estimated over 180,000 adults, is now estimated to have fewer than 300 adult sturgeon left — a decline of 99.8 percent.
In 1998, a coastwide fishing moratorium finally stopped more than a century of massive overharvesting for meat and caviar. But this has not proved enough to rescue Atlantic sturgeon, which still confront a gauntlet of other harms, including bycatch in other fisheries (the term bycatch refers to fish caught when targeting different species), pollution, dams, dredging, ship strikes, and warming ocean temperatures, as they traverse coastal waterways and ocean waters. Up and down the coast, in rivers and estuaries where they were once abundant and their spawning runs were once cultural fixtures, Atlantic sturgeon continue to disappear.