Sturgeons swim once more in Georgia rivers

Gary Beisser, who has been trained to know better, cannot help himself when describing Acipenser fulvescens.

“People say they’re ugly,” said Beisser, a senior fisheries biologist with the state Department of Natural Resources. “There’s nothing else that looks like them.”

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Georgia Department of Natural Resources

State biologists are reintroducing sturgeons into the Coosa River basin, hoping to bring back a species that vanished in the late 1960s. They plan to place 2,500 young sturgeons into the Oostanaula River Monday. They will join other sturgeons already introduced to northwest Georgia waters.

That’s the lake sturgeon for you — shovel-nosed, covered with bony plates, whisker-faced. It is so ancient-looking that the sturgeon appears to have just glided between the legs of a wading dinosaur.

Beisser loves the sturgeon and is helping re-introduce the creepy-looking swimmer to Georgia waters that once were its native habitat. Today, he is overseeing the release of young sturgeons into the Oostanaula River. With him, making sure Beisser gets its right, will be nearly 30 fifth-graders from Calhoun Elementary School.

The state will drop into the river about 2,500 sturgeons, each 4- to 5-inches long. They are from fertilized eggs that came from Wisconsin and hatched at the state’s Summerville Hatchery.

From the Oostanaula, the little fishes will travel south to Rome, where the Oostanaula and Etowah Rivers merge to become the Coosa. From there, they will head west.

Most will die — the mortality rate for the fingerlings is more than 90 percent — but some will mature, perhaps reaching 5 feet or more in length. They are long-lived, too: Biologists say it’s not unusual for one to live a century or longer.

Beisser hopes they find other sturgeons DNR has been releasing in the river basin since 2002. In time, Beisser said, the numbers of lake sturgeon may grow sufficiently so that the species again becomes commonplace in lakes and rivers where they swam for millennia.

Georgia sturgeons in the early- to mid-20th century faced a three-pronged threat: pollution, dam construction and overfishing. DNR biologists estimate that sturgeons vanished from the Coosa River basin in the late 1960s.

Nationwide, they haven’t fared much better. Waters in Canada, the Midwest, Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley once teemed with the big swimmers, which help keep waterways clean by feeding from lake and river bottoms. Today, their population is less than 1 percent of what the species numbered before 1900.

Sturgeons once were so commonplace in the upper Midwest that people speared the creatures through the ice.

As the sturgeon’s numbers dwindled, state officials began banning the practice, prompting the formation of Sturgeon For Tomorrow. The nonprofit organization, with chapters in Michigan and Wisconsin, raises money for sturgeon propagation and research.

“They are very interesting fish,” said Robert Bonner, vice president of the organization’s Northern Lakes chapter, formed about 10 years ago. A resident of Onaway, Mich., he recalls spearing the fish as they glided, dark and prehistoric, under the ice. He was a boy, and the fish were huge.

With research and money, he said, sturgeons are slowly recovering in Black Lake, where he lives. Inlike Beisser, Bonner thinks the sturgeon is a thing of beauty. “We think they’re quite pretty,” Bonner said. “Once you’ve lifted one up and held it, looked it in the eye and saw it look back, then you know.”

Sturgeons are slowly recovering, and anglers are allowed a limited take, said Bonner.

Not so in Georgia, where anglers are years away from taking a sturgeon home, said Beisser. Because they mature slowly — none is ready for mating until 12 years or older — sturgeons will be left alone in the Coosa River basin for the next decade or so.