April 16, 2015 — There are massive, mysterious beasts within America’s rivers—seldom seen and, until recently, rarely studied. But now scientists have a new tool to discover where these gentle giants lurk.
I speak of the Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus), a fish that has been on the earth since the time of the dinosaurs and is quite sizeable in its own right. It can grow as long as an SUV and weigh up to 800 pounds. But unless you see one jumping—sturgeon can breach like whales—you’d probably never know it was there.
For millions of years, hundreds of thousands of these ancient behemoths swam the rivers and estuaries between northeastern Canada and Florida. Then in 1900, the American caviar industry ramped up and gillnetters decimated the Atlantic sturgeon stock in the span of a decade.
“It was a short-lived fishery, kind of like clear-cutting a forest,” says Joseph Hightower, an ecologist at North Carolina State University.
Sturgeons are anadromous fish, which means they’re born in freshwater but then spend much of the rest of their lives downstream, either in brackish estuaries or in the sea itself. When it comes time to spawn, Atlantic sturgeon swim back upstream to mate and lay eggs. A single female Atlantic sturgeon can carry more than 300 pounds of eggs.