![]() Photo © Mike Donofrio, Wisconsin Fish, Wildlife and Parks Division And recovery work is underway throughout most of the historic range. Today commercial fishing for lake sturgeon is banned in the U.S. The fish that had abounded in drainages of Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River as far south as Alabama suddenly faced extinction. In 1885, 8.6 million pounds of sturgeon were taken from the Great Lakes. And the dams, along with pollution, made reproduction the exception rather than rule. Instead we slaughtered them because we learned that they could be burned as fuel for steamships, that their swim bladders were useful in making wine and beer, and that we could ship their eggs to Europe and get them relabeled as “Russian caviar.”ĭams made the slaughter easier because sturgeon on their spawning runs massed at the outfalls, bashing the impediments with their shovel-like snouts. In the second half of the 19 th century we ceased slaughtering lake sturgeon because we considered them pests. But they ripped up nets of commercial fishermen. These ancient fish, framed mostly on cartilage rather than bone and larger than most humans, had shared the planet with dinosaurs. In “The Song of Hiawatha” Longfellow celebrated the lake sturgeon, “king of fishes,” and the First Nations for whom it was sacred.Įven as the poet penned this verse, North Americans were killing and trashing lake sturgeon. ![]() ![]() Lake sturgeon, our elders by some 150 million years, have a bright future - if Americans ignore voices of the past.
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