Snow was blowing horizontally across the frozen surface of Black Lake. A scattering of squatty ice shanties were barely visible through the blowing snow. But between my hood, hat and multiple scarves, not much was visible at all. Just minutes before, it had felt safe and sunny, standing near a big entertainment tent. But out into the middle of Black Lake was a different story. One that looks more like Antarctica than Michigan.
We went up to the frozen lake in northern Michigan on a snow packed February weekend to see Lake Sturgeon. An ancient fish that looks like a cross between a Ninja Turtle and a roomba. If both of those things lived over a hundred years.
Five minutes after meeting us, Jason Woiderski and Scott Williams had generously offered to drive us out onto the lake to see the ice fishing shanties. They are both involved with the nonprofit, Sturgeon for Tomorrow, that runs the annual Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree, the main event we had come up to see. It gained some notoriety last year when the season only lasted 17 minutes. This year’s season was over in 48 minutes.
“ We only allow six fish to be taken out of this lake due to population restraint. This season goes very fast and is very limited. So yes, your opportunity is very slim. You almost got a better chance of hitting the Powerball,” said Woiderski.
Hundreds of people registered to fish, but only six people would catch one.
In the late 1990s, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources decided the sturgeon population needed help. Numbers were crashing. A stocking program was created in 2001. But more than just one science project, it was a whole community effort. Together, scientists, tribal agencies and volunteers created a series of programs and organizations to promote and support the sturgeon.
Black Lake is more than two hundred miles from Lake Erie, but it gave us a glimpse into how one community manages and celebrates the sturgeon. To learn more about the sturgeon itself and the science behind its restoration, we traveled south, to Ohio.
Lake Erie's difficult history
The Lake Erie watershed has been through multiple environmental disasters. But Erie is the most biologically productive of the Great Lakes. It’s the smallest by volume, but it supports over one hundred different species of fish and a rich variety of habitat types.
The Toledo Zoo has a large touch tank with several small-ish Lake Sturgeon looping curiously around. The zoo’s campus is sprawled out near the Maumee River, which feeds into Lake Erie.
“So part of the really cool thing about Lake Sturgeon is that they’re one of these iconic fish. In the Great Lakes in Lake Erie, they're our largest fish. The adults get to be six to eight feet long. They can weigh hundreds of pounds,” said Matt Cross, the Director of Vertebrate Conservation at the Toledo Zoo.
Sturgeon is a common name for a group of fish that exist around the world, not just in Lake Erie. From the Adriatic Sea to the Sea of Japan. But one thing they have in common is that they’re threatened. All species of sturgeon are listed as vulnerable or endangered. But scientists think the Maumee River and Lake Erie historic populations were special.
“People will have said that you used to be able to walk across the Maumee River on sturgeon when they would come back to spawn. Now that's obviously an exaggeration, but probably akin to something like the Passenger Pigeon, where there were so many of them in there that you could see them visibly. And so this used to be a major spawning population for the Lake Sturgeon here, for Lake Erie,” said Cross.
Sturgeon are an important fish for the Indigenous people who live and lived in the Great Lakes region. They celebrated the sturgeon and harvested them for food. But European settlers saw the sturgeon as a nuisance fish.
“They were clubbed, thrown up on land. We almost eliminated sturgeon from the Great Lakes in less than a hundred years,” said Cross.
It wasn’t until the mid to late 1800’s that the settlers realized they could make a commercial fishery selling sturgeon caviar from Lake Erie.
“They're initially harvested heavily for their caviar. And so as we see with a lot of other species, when you start removing, especially females in the populations, you have a really rapid extinction vortex….as you start to get lower and lower numbers, you get trapped into this, like, downward spiral, right?” said Cross.
Sturgeon restoration
They are working hard to return the sturgeon to its rightful place in the waters. This is a big task. Matt Cross is part of a research group working on Lake Sturgeon reintroduction. It is a group effort with a long list of partners, including the Toledo Zoo, Genoa National Fish Hatchery, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS).
One of the things Matt showed us was the zoo’s streamside sturgeon rearing trailer. It pulls Maumee River water into the tanks where they house baby sturgeon all summer.
Cross explained how fast they grow when they’re young, as a strategy to get bigger than bite-sized as fast as possible. Baby fish are very vulnerable, but past a certain size, there’s actually nothing in the lake that can eat them.
“They've got like this built in armor and so when they're young, you can see on these smaller fish it sticks out more… once they get to this size, barring any accidents, like, nothing's gonna be eating them.”
Sturgeon life cycle
As adults, they mostly live in lakes, but they reproduce in rivers and that’s where the baby larval fish and juveniles grow up. Then, they move into lakes as they get older. So this fish has a built-in migration as part of its life cycle.
But sturgeon are migratory and tend to go back to the waters they’re from. And this is called imprinting. There’s a window of time where the sturgeon cue in on an understanding of their home waters. Chemical cues, smell, even. And they will navigate back there later in life.
Sturgeon preschool
So part one of this project is catching sturgeon in the spring, right when they’re ready to spawn and then combining their eggs and sperm in containers. Then, the researchers care for the thousands of baby fish.
“I used to joke when we first got sturgeon that my wife became a single mother for two weeks because it was, you know, I'd be in there 16 hours a day working and doing things,” said Cross.
This is basically a preschool program for baby sturgeon. They are raised in hatcheries, cared for all summer, until they’re big enough to not be so bite-sized. In the fall, once they’re about over six inches long, they get released back into the rivers.
The collected and fertilized fish eggs are split into two groups. Half of the 3,000 now-fertilized fish eggs are trucked up to the Genoa National Fish Hatchery in Wisconsin for their six months of pre-K. And the other half stay here, in the zoo trailer. This is part of an experiment to understand how sturgeon imprint and to test the results of being raised in a hatchery unattached to their home waters versus raised in tanks with the river water.
After visiting the Toledo Zoo, we went to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Detroit River Fish Laboratory to learn more about how sturgeon move around the Great Lakes watershed.
We met with Jorden McKenna, another scientist working on the Maumee sturgeon reintroduction. McKenna did her Master’s thesis on the Maumee River Lake Sturgeon restoration, and she has been involved in tagging and tracking them across the Lake Erie watershed.
“So we know that historically in Lake Erie that there were 19 sustainable spawning populations prior to the early 1920s, and those fish unfortunately were removed to pollution, over-fishing and, habitat degradation over time. And so we haven't seen fish in the Maumee River for over a century,” said McKenna.
This led the scientists to develop a plan to reintroduce Lake Sturgeon to the Maumee River. But once enacted, because of the long and migratory life of a sturgeon, it will be another 15-20 years before they learn if baby sturgeon they’ve released return to the river to spawn.
So until then, scientists like McKenna are working to solve the mystery of where the sturgeon go after they’re released. One of the ways they do this is with an existing giant array. The Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS) is a big underwater grid of sensors that can be used to map out the movements of tagged sturgeon.
The fish are only six or seven inches long when they are first released. They’ve spent the summer in the Genoa National Fish Hatchery or the Toledo Zoo streamside sturgeon trailer and now they are out on their own, swimming around the river and lake. Each fish gets a little acoustic tag with a unique ID. It works kind of like a toll pass token.
“So it picks it up through sound, and then we get a timestamp of when that fish was there. And then we have the GPS coordinates, so we can kind of create a movement pattern and track these fish once they're released,” said McKenna.
As they swim near the receivers, they ping like a tiny tollbooth, and scientists get a notification of where they are and when.
“Everybody loves what we call, like, the blue dot animation, but these are pretty cool. And this just is like showing you, like, detections over time,” said McKenna as she played some animations of the sturgeon movement data.
A series of tiny blue dots darted around a map of Lake Erie and the Maumee River. This is how the scientists visualized what is happening below the surface of Lake Erie and the Maumee River.
“We see them through the entire course of those first six months of life. And it's cool like having a part in reintroducing this historic fish that used to be here everywhere. They've been around for over a hundred million years; they've lived through the pollution. But they made it,” said McKenna. “They've survived this long. It's just they need a little bit of help, or a lot of help, from us to ideally bring back those populations.”
Jorden McKenna and Matt Cross are just two people who are part of a much bigger project. But they both emphasized the community part of all of this. They talked about the big release party they have every fall. A sturgeon launch party.
“We invite people out to help us release the fish bucket by bucket,” said Cross. He explained that they make it a big event, with educational booths, food trucks and live music.
“I think people see it as a legacy we're leaving our children because these fish will outlive us. And, it's just a really, really fun event,” said Cross.
I found more than 10 different sturgeon festivals advertised online. Sturgeon have a long life and many seasons to celebrate.
And that brings us back to Black Lake and the sturgeon from the beginning of this story. The annual famous “fishing with a high chance of drinking“ shivaree. Every year, they crown one angler the king. The person who catches the biggest of the six fish that were harvested that season. This year, Jordan Guelig won with a sturgeon that weighed almost 80 pounds.
But the shivaree is much more than a party and a wildly short fishing event. It has an important educational component. Featuring the real star of the show that day, a fish named Courage. At the back of the entertainment tent, on a long table next to an icy looking sea lamprey, Courage was doing smooth, slow laps in a small tank. He was wearing his signature armor and spikes, adorably named scoots.
“So these are the two we have. This is Hope, and this is Courage. I just brought Courage 'cause that was the first one I grabbed. The kids get to name 'em, the fifth graders named them,” said Ann Douglas, the Director of the Black Lake Sturgeon in the Classroom program.
Courage is a nine month old sturgeon. Just over six inches long. He’s part of the K-12 program aimed at educating children about sturgeon. It’s part of the Sturgeon for Tomorrow nonprofit that is also running the shivaree.
“ In October, Sturgeon for Tomorrow delivers the sturgeon to the classrooms. You can use them straight through for all the grades, but then we release it back into the Black Lake River, where they came from in May,” said Douglas. The classrooms can apply to be part of this program and need special permits. But then, the juvenile sturgeon can live in the classroom and be incorporated into lesson plans, giving kids an up-close view of this long-lived dinosaur fish.
The sturgeon can live a hundred years or more. So the humans involved in their research, conservation, and education will likely not live long enough to see their baby sturgeon get old. They all do this work hoping future generations of humans will be there to continue it.
“They're long lived, so that's why we need to get the kids involved. And that's why we went with Sturgeon in the Classroom, so that the kids will take over for me,” said Douglas.
Sturgeon restoration is a multi-state, multi-national effort. There are projects happening across the Great Lakes region, by so many groups. Lake Erie was historically home to many sturgeon populations, and while their destruction happened quickly, in just a few years, it will take generations of humans to repair the damage. But communities are working hard to return the sturgeon crowd to Lake Erie. A few thousand fish per year, one year at a time, the dinosaurs are starting to return to the Great Lakes.
Kate Furby and Jodi Westrick reported and produced this episode.
With editing from Rebecca Williams, Jodi Westrick, Dustin Dwyer and Vincent Duffy. Special thanks to Randi Kest, Corey Wykoff from the Toledo Zoo, Jordan Guelig, and Lukas Van Deslunt for additional footage.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Beyond the Shore is a production of Michigan Public. You can find all of our podcasts at michiganpublic.org/podcasts.
