L. sturgeon fed protected

[Lee Borgersen]

    Group wants lake sturgeon federally protected.

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The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday asked the federal government to list the lake sturgeon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. News Tribune file photo.
DULUTH—The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday announced it has petitioned the federal government to protect lake sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act.

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The U.S. environmental group says the big, long-lived fish needs more help to bolster recovery efforts that have been slow to succeed.


Lake sturgeon — native to the Great Lakes and Mississippi River systems — can live to be more than 100 years old and grow larger than 200 pounds. But due to overfishing, habitat loss, dams and pollution, the prehistoric-looking fish was nearly wiped out by the 1970s. Sturgeon numbers have declined an estimated 99 percent since the 1800s.

The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list lake sturgeon as "threatened" across the 23 states where it was known to exist.

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"These behemoth fish are a bellwether for the health of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River," said Marc Fink, a Duluth-based attorney for the group. "To guarantee their long-term survival, we need to give real protection to (sturgeon) and their habitats."


The group, which said it also asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine if there are distinct populations of sturgeon that need protecting, said sturgeon in Lake Superior and Missouri River system are among the more imperilled while those in the eastern Great Lakes and upper Mississippi River are doing better.

Sturgeon are native to the St. Louis River system and Lake Superior, and efforts have been underway for decades to bring them back through stocking. Yet while the St. Louis River has a healthy population of adult lake sturgeon, those fish are not producing the numbers of young fish that biologists had hoped to see.

Very few adult females are returning to spawn, and biologists have found little evidence of young sturgeon being produced. After seeing evidence of low reproductive success among sturgeon in the river, fisheries officials with the Minnesota and Wisconsin departments of Natural Resources have decided to resume stocking them in the river in 2019 hoping more stocking might help spur more adult females. The fish will come from the Sturgeon River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a tributary of Lake Superior, in cooperation with the state of Michigan and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Biologists also suspect that legacy contaminants deposited by industry decades ago in the St. Louis River may still be compromising eggs and larval sturgeon in the river. Research on possible contaminants in sturgeon will begin this year at the Environmental Protection Agency's Midcontinent Ecology Laboratory in Duluth. Scientists will analyze blood samples of adult sturgeon in the river to determine whether the adults are likely able to reproduce successfully.

The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday asked the federal government to list the lake sturgeon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.  file photo.

     

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[glenn57]

  awe gawd another group of tree huggers!