Illinois welcomes 11,000 endangered baby lake sturgeon

[August 05, 2023]  By Zeta Cross | The Center Square contributor

(The Center Square) – Illinois anglers have a challenge to dream about.

Earlier this month, the Jake Wolf Memorial fish hatchery in Topeka took possession of 11,000 baby lake sturgeon. The lake sturgeon will eventually be released for repopulation in Illinois waters.

Frank Sladek, natural resources coordinator at Jake Wolf, says the baby sturgeon are chowing down on massive quantities of frozen bloodworms. The state fish hatchery has dedicated an entire refrigerator and freezer to store hundreds of pounds of sturgeon food for the new arrivals, Sladek said.

“What amazes me the most is how much they eat,” Sladek said. “These little guys are just ravenous.”

The 2 inch babies are constantly in motion so they are a lot of fun to watch, he said. To protect them from the summer heat, the sturgeon are being raised in tanks indoors. Jake Wolf has a water cooling system that keeps the fish comfortable in spite of the heat waves.

“We are taking really good care of them,” he said.

In the 1800s, when herds of buffalo roamed the plains, the Great Lakes region was home to more than 15 million lake sturgeon, a “prehistoric species,” Sladek said.

“They are living fossils that have been on this planet a very. very long time,” he said.

Lake sturgeon are bottom-feeding fish with long snouts that allow them to suction up bottom-dwelling organisms. They can grow as long as 8 feet, but it takes decades for a lake sturgeon to get to that size, Sladek said. Lake sturgeon don’t have scales. Their armor-like appearance comes from a covering that is similar to tooth enamel. Lake sturgeon can live to be 100 years old.

Commercial fishing, dams, loss of habitat and habitat degradation have decimated the population. Lake sturgeon are currently on the endangered species list. If an angler catches one, the law says the sturgeon should be released back in the water, Sladek said.

A white sturgeon at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's Sturgeon Center at Bonneville Dam in January 2010. Courtesy of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife - Photo by Rick Swart

“The loss of our lake sturgeon has been much like the slaughter of the buffalo. We can barely imagine how abundant these great fish once were,” Mark Fink of the Center for Biological Diversity told the EPA in 2018. “To guarantee their long-term survival, we need to give real protection to them and their habitats.”

Lake sturgeon are important to the Great Lake ecosystem as an indicator species. They can only survive in a clean pond, lake or river. They depend on aquatic invertebrates that are sensitive to the environment.

“This effort is very exciting for us because we have a chance to bring them back into the state and stock them in rivers and tributaries where they once spawned,” Stadek said.

Repopulating the ancient fish will not be easy. Lake sturgeon take 15 to 25 years to reach spawning age. Adult sturgeon do not spawn every year. The vast majority of their spawning runs have been lost.

The challenge for the Jake Wolf Memorial Hatchery is to keep as many of the young fish alive as possible so that they can be released in the wild. Exactly where they will eventually be released has yet to be determined, Sladek said. Jake Wolf scientists are giving careful consideration to potential stocking sites.

“When you are dealing with an endangered species, there is a lot of thought and care that goes into determining where these fish are going to be stocked,” Sladek said.

The Mississippi River has been discussed as one of the main stocking sites because small populations of lake sturgeon are currently found in parts of the Mississippi, he said.