This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

A young sturgeon just before being released into the Tittabawassee River.

This young sturgeon was on display at the Grand Rapids Museum several years ago; the Chippewa Nature Center plans to welcome one for a season or so before release into the Saginaw Bay waters.

“For 65 million years,” says Mike Kelly of the Conservation Fund, “sturgeon in Saginaw Bay and the Great Lakes did just fine.”

Then came what’s now known as "settler culture" or European settlement, and within about 200 years, sturgeon numbers plummeted.

Logging, farming and development destroyed river spawning habitat. Massive adult fish were killed as nuisances when they tore up commercial fishing nets or, after it was discovered that their eggs rivaled European Beluga caviar in taste and price, harvested relentlessly.

Now, efforts are underway to restore Saginaw Bay watershed sturgeon, bottom feeders that can grow to seven feet long, weigh up to 300 pounds, and live 100 years. The Conservation Fund is a big part of what Kelly called a 20-year commitment to restore the sturgeon fishery in the Bay.

A couple of weeks ago, the Conservation Fund and some of its partners released approximately 400 young surgeon at four sites on Bay rivers, including the Caldwell boat launch on the Tittabawassee River at Midland.

Another 500 or 600 sturgeon will be released on Saturday, September 24: on the Tittabawassee at Midland at 11 a.m., on the Shiawassee River at Chesaning at noon, and on the Cass River at Frankenmuth at 2 p.m. This will bring the program’s five-year total to about 5,000 sturgeon released into the watershed.

This year’s first batch came from a northern Michigan hatchery operated by the Black River Chapter of the conservation group Sturgeon for Tomorrow and other groups, from fish returning there to spawn.

The fish to be released later this month are being reared in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Genoa National Fish Hatchery in Wisconsin, from sperm and eggs from fish captured in Lake St. Clair in southeast Lower Michigan.

This dual sourcing boosts genetic diversity.

Each fish bears a PIT (passive integrated transponder) tag; a scanner can identify the individual fish. DNR survey crews have found two adult fish during Bay trawl surveys, Kelly said, and juvenile fish have also been caught (and released – they can’t be fished for or kept) by ice anglers on the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers.

Said Kelly of the program, “We are cautiously optimistic.”

Why go to all this bother when the Bay and its tributaries have all sorts of fish already?

“I think we owe it to the fishery,” said Kelly, in a phone interview, “to give them a boost, since we were the ones to damage them. They (sturgeon) are a key indicator of Great Lakes health and if we’re doing the right things to bring them (the Great Lakes) back.”

The planted fish grow quickly to as long as 19 inches in a single season. Males become sexually mature at 15 years of age, females at 20, Kelly said.

Not much eats the fish once their bony protective projections, called skutes, are fully developed. But before that, survival is tough; hence the hatchery stays. “If we can get them to four inches, we can get them to four feet,” Kelly quotes biologists, and it’s at that four-inch length and above that the fish are planted.

Prior to the late-summer release, about 100 additional fish were retained at the Black River hatchery to grow a bit more before being fitted with transponders under a multi-year grant to the Great Lakes Acoustical Telemetry Observation System. Receivers installed in the watershed will record the identity and passage of transponder-equipped sturgeon.

Kelly said the 2020 failure of the Wixom and Sanford dams hasn’t dramatically affected sturgeon, nor would their repair. Prime spawning habitat lies in the Upper Chippewa River, a Tittabawassee tributary, making development of “some kind of fish passage over the Dow Dam” on the Tittabawassee a potential aim.     

Conservation Fund-aided removal of dams at Chesaning and Frankenmuth has also opened up what Kelly calls good sturgeon spawning grounds.

HELPING SET UP and conduct Midland sturgeon releases is the Chippewa Nature Center -- which is also readying its own special segment of the sturgeon effort.

CNC will rear a sturgeon in its Visitor Center Atrium, as part of a Sturgeon in the Classroom program conducted by the Black River Chapter of the conservation group Sturgeon For Tomorrow.

As in 14 classrooms, a sturgeon will be delivered to CNC, probably in October, for release the following May, when it’s grown from a few inches to as long as 19. That is, unless CNC gets permission that it’s seeking to keep the fish, in its 150-gallon tank in the Visitor Center’s atrium, through summer so more people can see it, said Jenn Kirts, CNC director of programs.

Most Sturgeon in the Classroom sites must return their fish to the Black River facility for release, but Kirts said CNC’s sturgeon, because of its close genetic match to Saginaw Bay fish, will be eligible for release here.

This is CNC’s first year in the program; Kelly said another local school’s involvement is being developed.

Keep in mind that this all about a return of sturgeon, not an introduction. A sturgeon bone was found at a CNC archeological site, and Native Americans in this region are said to have welcomed the spring-run fish as an important food source after a long winter.

Kirts chuckled as she used the term that biologists and naturalists often employ today to describe big, interesting critters: “charismatic megafauna.”

“To behold one is amazing,” said Kirts of adult sturgeon. Big, and old, “They’re one of those species that’s innately interesting and captures our imagination. To being them back would be phenomenal.”

To learn more about lake sturgeon restoration efforts, visit the Saginaw Bay Sturgeon website at www.saginawbaysturgeon.org. 

Email Midland freelance outdoors writer Steve Griffin at michigangriff@gmail.com