- Toledo Zoo and Aquarium hosted the annual Sturgeon Fest last weekend. 1,200 visitors participated in the sturgeon restoration efforts.
- 1,500 baby sturgeon were released into the Maumee River to help historic sturgeon populations recover.
Last Saturday was the annual Sturgeon Fest hosted by the Toledo Zoo and Aquarium. It was a striking scene, with people lining up to collect their six inch sturgeon in tiny buckets.
Visitors waited in line for their turn to pour the baby fish into the Maumee River in Ohio.
At the end of the line was a pair of small blue and white waterslides. Each visitor was helped by a teen zoo volunteer, making sure each small sturgeon was released to freedom in the river. Over 1,200 people attended. Live music, food trucks and educational booths celebrated the ancient Great Lakes fish.
This sturgeon restoration program has been going since 2018, the year that Alyssa Cross was born. We spoke to her dad, Matt Cross, about the difficulty of juggling raising a family and baby fish at the same time in our podcast episode for Beyond the Shore earlier this year. You can listen to and watch the full episode here: Restoring the dinosaur fish of Lake Erie.
The sturgeon have a complex life cycle that starts in rivers and moves into lakes as they age. To help give them a head start, the Toledo Zoo and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their partners work together. They collect the fish gametes during spawning season in the spring, fertilize the eggs, and raise the baby sturgeon in a streamside trailer all summer. Newly hatched sturgeon can be very small, said Matt Cross, the Director of Vertebrate Conservation for the Toledo Zoo and Aquarium.
“They're about the size of little pinheads or tapioca balls, and then they hatch very quickly. So after about three or four days they hatch. They've got a little yolk sac. They feed off the yolk sac for like the first week and a half, two weeks, then they start feeding on decapsulated brine shrimp,” said Cross.
By rearing the tiny sturgeon in their zoo trailer all summer, they are allowing the fish to grow in a protected environment, without predators. Once they're released, they’re about six inches long and much harder for another fish to eat.
The program has several goals. In addition to boosting the juvenile survival rate, it also tracks and monitors the fish as it moves through the Maumee River, into Lake Erie, and back into a river to spawn.
“Every one of the fish that are released here today have a tag like you put in your cats and dogs, the little PIT tags. And so if we ever catch it, and we can scan it, and we can say, "Okay, this fish was released this year, and it was this long when it was released. So then we can see how much it grew,” said Cross.
Scientists are interested in tracking the sturgeons’ growth, survival and locations across the Great Lakes ecosystems. The fish get very big, up to six feet long. This year, a new study estimated that the females may also live up to 400 years, which is more than twice as long as previously thought by scientists. The juvenile fish released this year may not return to the Maumee River for another 15-20 years. But scientists think they may imprint on their home waters, so the program hopes to see them return to this historic spawning ground.
1,500 baby sturgeon were released on Saturday, according to Cross. He worked the event and was also joined there by his family. His two children, Ian and Alyssa Cross, have grown up at the zoo, helping their dad.
" We got to feed them sometimes, and we got to, to pick them up….They're kinda cuter than other fish," said Alyssa, age 8.
“Because they're endangered, I think that it's good that the Toledo Zoo is doing this to help bring back their population,” said Ian, age 11.
When asked what they might name the fish they release this year, Ian said, “Bob” and Alyssa said “Squishy Fin.”
Marsha Swanson, an educator at a local school, said she had encouraged the school’s 400 students to attend the event. They created a poster where the kids could all share the names of the sturgeon they released.
Animals that live long need generations of humans to understand and care for them. Sturgeon restoration is a team sport. Sturgeon Fest is just one of many events around the Midwest celebrating the giant fish and its human community.
