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Sturgeon fish7/30/2023 ![]() The effort, she said, was led primarily by the tribes in the region. The last part of Langston’s talk charted the conservation efforts in the last 20 years to restore the Great Lakes’ sturgeon population. “Any one of these things and sturgeon could be resilient against them, but when they all happen one after another, both the sturgeon and Indigenous peoples found themselves with a problem,” Langston said. Sturgeon were soon on the verge of extinction. The myriad dams erected to provide power for the mills obstructed sturgeon migration. In the early 20th century, newly built paper mills dumped pollutants into the water where sturgeon swam. Soon, the Great Lakes produced much of the world’s caviar. In the 1880s, entrepreneurs realized they could sell sturgeon roe as caviar. When steamships came along, fisherman piled sturgeon on the shores of rivers and lakes and dried them, burning them for logs for ship fuel. Meanwhile, the whites pushed the Native American tribes off their land, enabling further habitat destruction. “And so commercial fishermen just slaughtered them,” Langston said. Since sturgeon ripped through commercial fishing nets, fishermen soon viewed the sturgeon as pests. Very soon though, the commercial fishing industry arrived and targeted herring and lake trout instead. Initially, the European settlers who pushed westward in the 1800s traded with the Native Americans for dried sturgeon to eat. They were “scholars, professors, lawyers and mediators,” Langston said, involved in ensuring good governance. The Ojibwe, who now live in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Ontario, Canada, named one of the clans the Sturgeon clan. The Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Great Lakes region moved around with the fish, which were a major food source.Īccording to Langston, sturgeon were so plentiful that the Potawatomi and Ojibwe tribes’ legends “tell of rivers so full of sturgeon that a person could walk across the water on the backs of the fish.” Lake sturgeon migrate back to their birthplace to spawn. They have sucker-like mouths with fleshy lips - “little Dyson vacuum cleaners that have evolved to go sucking up the crustaceans and mollusks and crabs, and then they just kind of swallow them,” Langston said. Lake sturgeon typically grow seven to eight feet, weigh as much as 300 pounds and live up to 150 years. Roughly 150 million years ago, they settled into their current size, shape and physiology and haven’t changed their form much since. Their direct ancestors survived the Great Permian Extinction that killed nine out of every 10 species and soon became the dominant, big fish in every major river system in North America and Eurasia. Sturgeon evolved long before the dinosaurs. “They have some serious history,” said Langston, the Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University. Not bad for a fish mostly known for producing the eggs eaten as caviar.
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