January 27, 2013 — Believe it or not, there’s a Chesapeake Bay fish in even worse shape than the recovering striped bass, the troubled blue crab and even the imperiled bay oyster. The Atlantic sturgeon, pushed to the brink of extinction by overfishing and development, is little more than a memory in the Potomac River, ready for a spot in a museum.
The last time fishermen caught an adult Atlantic sturgeon in the Potomac, “The French Connection” was a hit movie, Ike and Tina Turner topped the record charts with “Proud Mary” and an American Motors Gremlin four-door sold for $2,000. Forty-three years later, river watchers are only noting unreliable sturgeon sightings.
Convinced that one of the Potomac’s signature fish might be gone for good, the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin has thrown its support behind a Maryland and U.S. Fish and Wildlife plan to use 60 domesticated Atlantic sturgeon, mostly from New York’s Hudson River, to restock the Potomac.
But the effort to bring them back has its own troubles. Last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fishery service listed four varieties of Atlantic sturgeon populations as endangered — the New York Bight, Carolina, South Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay.
The Chesapeake Bay listing has all but dashed the hope of restocking using the Hudson River sturgeon kept at a Maryland hatchery. To preserve the genetic purity of protected animals under the Endangered Species Act, rules prohibit mixing wild and tame species, no matter how much they look alike.
Long story short, Hudson sturgeon aren’t allowed to potentially mess around with their wild cousins in the Potomac. The result is that the Potomac will almost certainly lose its oldest, largest and most distinctive fish.
Marine biologists say it will take more than a century for sturgeon that migrate up and down the Atlantic Coast to return to spawn in Chesapeake Bay tributaries such as the Potomac.
Read the full story at the Washington Post