September 7, 2013 — this ancient fish species – which was nearly eradicated from Lake Erie by 20th century overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation – appears to be battling back against a dinosaur’s fate, repopulating waters off the Queen City and along New York State’s shoreline in greater and greater numbers.
The lake sturgeon’s ancestors traversed the world’s ancient sea bottom at a time when Tyrannosaurus Rex battled Triceratops on land.
Fast-forward tens of millions of years, and this ancient fish species – which was nearly eradicated from Lake Erie by 20th century overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation – appears to be battling back against a dinosaur’s fate, repopulating waters off the Queen City and along New York State’s shoreline in greater and greater numbers.
“There has been a natural recovery in the lower Niagara River and Lake Erie,” said Lisa Holst, who specializes in rare fish research for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The lake sturgeon, she said, has hit “a critical point in their re-emergence” that may regularly put them face-to-face with anglers.
“They’re kind of a living dinosaur,” Holt said. “They’re so different, they look partly like a shark, partly like an alligator.”
Modern-day encounters with this prehistoric creature are already occurring both locally and all around Lake Erie.
A Dunkirk-based DEC fisheries project captured 50 sturgeon in just two days earlier this year, using mesh gill nets around Buffalo harbor. And several fishermen have come across the crude-looking, bony-plated “fossil fish” amid the shoals and breakwater of the Buffalo Harbor during the spring spawning season over the last five or so years, Holst said.
Others have experienced similarly close encounters, according to reports from around Lake Erie.
A fisherman in Painesville, Ohio, pulled a nearly 4-foot-long sturgeon from the lake’s waters last month. Another, near Erie, Pa., achieved the same feat last year. A year before that, a sturgeon was caught offshore near Cleveland. And, in 2009, a 3-foot sturgeon was snagged and released in nearly 50 feet of water off Presque Isle near Erie, Pa.
“It’s incredibly encouraging,” said Dimitry Gorsky, a fish biologist in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose Basom office fields up to 30 reports of lake sturgeon encounters every season. “Definitely, the fish are a lot more visible now, which means the populations are doing relatively well,” he said.
Making a recovery
Both environmental and circumstantial factors contribute to the lake sturgeon’s recovery.
First came the Clean Water Act of 1972 and legal prohibitions against capturing the lake sturgeon that became effective a few years later.
Then came other factors, including restoration of spawning habitat, controls on sea lamprey populations and the rapid proliferation of the zebra and quagga mussels in the lakes.
Lamprey attacks often prove fatal to younger sturgeon under 5 years old while the pesky invasive mussels have provided the bottom-feeding sturgeon a virtual smorgasbord of food.
“It turns out lake sturgeon really like zebra mussels,” Holst said.
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