The last time lake sturgeon were spotted in the Milwaukee River, was in 1853.
But efforts are underway to bring the ancient fish back.
This weekend more than 11 hundred fingerlings will be released just below the dam in the village of Thiensville.
WUWM Environmental Reporter Susan Bence visited the Riveredge Nature Center - 30 miles north of Milwaukee, where volunteers have been nurturing the small sturgeon since last spring.
A small chunk of Riveredge Nature Center’s 380 acres is dedicated to bringing lake sturgeon back to the Milwaukee River.
“I just have to open this gate and then I’ll drive down the rest of the way,"
Researcher Marc White drives down a slope, studded with tall pines and magnificent maples. A few hundred yards short of the Milwaukee River’s edge stands a gleaming trailer.
“So this is it,” White says.
Inside, four deep fiberglass tubs are alive with six-month-old sturgeon. The small creatures rocket around the tank.
“This is their cutest life stage. If you don’t like a baby sturgeon you’re not going to like the adults. The adults are like creatures from some other planet,” White says.
When they’re “grown up,” everything about this fish is “oversized.” They’re eight feet long and can live to the ripe old age of 100
. The Great Lakes and their tributaries used to team with sturgeon. But White says, by the turn of the last century, 1900, the population was nearly depleted.
Fishermen used to consider them a nuisance.
“When they caught them in their nets, they would just chuck them on shore and let them rot,” White ways.
Only later, did people realize the sturgeon was worth harvesting.
“Not just for the meat, but for the eggs that could be made into caviar, and the swim bladder that could be used in the brewing industry,” White says.
You don’t even want to know how the bladder fits into beer making.
Over the last decade or so, the state decided to try to restore the native species to its original spawning sites, including in the Milwaukee River.
That brings us to four years ago, when Riveredge joined with the DNR to raise fledgling sturgeon in the glistening trailer. Teams from the center traveled to the Wolf River in northeastern Wisconsin to harvest eggs. Sturgeon spawning is booming there.
“You know, around April 15, the sturgeon start to make their run and the DNR has specialists that physically carry them up the bank. Four guys hold that huge fish down, while one of them is rubbing her tummy, trying to get some eggs to come out and they hold a bucket there and some of the eggs will come out and then they can let that female go back with the river,” White says.
Each year, the Riveredge team brings home eggs from four females, 10,000 eggs from each. That’s just a small percentage of an individual sturgeon’s eggs bounty.
“But she will actually produce in that year that she spawns on the order of 1.5 million to 2.5 million eggs,” White says.
Back at the center, the four tanks where the eggs will develop are filled with water from the Milwaukee River. White says along the way however, the water passes through an intricate filtration system.
“A lot of people who have fish tanks have that same type of system. This is just bigger equivalent of that. The hope is, by raising sturgeon in water from the river, the fish will be drawn back to it years from now when they’re ready to spawn,” White says.
But White says rearing from egg to a healthy youngster is tricky. Riveredge’s goal is to successfully raise 1,500 young lake sturgeon each year.
The first year, only 27 survived.
“The challenges were keeping the sediment down so that the eggs didn’t become totally contaminated and die of fungal attack and then the real big challenge is getting the sturgeon to survive for the first two to three months of life when they’re just very fragile,” White says.
A car rolls up to the trailer.
“There’s Kitt, she’s one of our sturgeon volunteers,” White says.
White calls Kitt Walters one of 28 faithful volunteers. They come in a small teams seven days a week, to flush the filtration system and generally keep the place humming.
“It looks like she’s suiting up to go into the river,” White says.
Walters is pulling on her work gear - waterproof bib overalls and heavy rubber boots. Before she heads down to the river to make sure the pump isn’t mucked up, Walters checks on the sturgeon.
“I’m just checking, saying hi, they are like your kids, you watch them grow,” Walters says.
This is her last shift, before the sturgeon are released.
Marc White says Riveredge and its volunteers have made a 25-year commitment to the project.
“The value of this is not just that we are conserving the largest, oldest living fish in the Great Lakes System. It’s also that it really ties people to an incredible resource. and that’s the Milwaukee River,” White says.
If all goes well, one of the first females Riveredge has raised might spawn right here along the river.
White says he hopes he’ll still be around – that would be about 20 years from now.
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