Alabama Sturgeon On Last Chance

April 4, 2008

Release from: Katherine Bouma
Birmingham News (Alabama)

A year after state biologists found a single Alabama sturgeon, the fish appears to be healthy and is making its way upstream to spawn.

But there may not be a mate left for the only sturgeon found in almost a decade.

For the past year, biologists have followed the fish, searching for a mate. But none has been discovered in the Alabama River and money for the search is running out.

"Our funds have basically dried up," said Stan Cook, head of the state's fisheries division. "What little funds we have left, we decided to devote to tracking that sturgeon."

Scientists say that lone fish may be one of the rare and elusive species born before the rivers were altered so totally that the sturgeon can no longer reproduce. Now, biologists say, dams may keep the fish from swimming upstream far enough to reach its spawning grounds.

"The best we can tell, these fish have been declining the last 40 or 50 years," said Bernie Kuhajda, a research biologist at the University of Alabama. "But their real decline started when those last two dams went in - Millers Ferry and Claiborne Lock and Dam."

State and federal fisheries biologists have hoped for many years to catch sturgeon and help them reproduce in a fish hatchery so the species can repopulate the rivers.

Scientists had been unsuccessfully searching for the sturgeon for almost eight years before two fisheries biologists netting for paddlefish below Claiborne Dam caught one last April.

They took the live fish to the state's Marion Fish Hatchery, where they determined it was male and inserted a sonar tracking device into its abdomen.

At the same time, the search for more sturgeon went into high gear. Before returning the fish to its home in the Alabama River below Claiborne Dam, as many as seven federal and state boats spent weeks searching the area for what is believed to be the rarest vertebrate animal in North America.

No Alabama sturgeon were found. Since that time, scientists have followed the remaining live fish, learning its habitat and its habits. But they haven't found it a mate, or even a brother.

"We need to get eight to 10 specimens in a very short time period, and we need a reproductively active female for one of them," said Steve Rider, the primary biologist on the sturgeon project for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. "Getting one here and one there isn't going to work."

Some sturgeon sperm is on ice in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife lab in Georgia, waiting for a female.

Very old sturgeon:

The fish caught in 2007 was the second-largest on record, leading biologists to believe it is very old. Scientists say it may be one of the last fish spawned before Claiborne, the southernmost dam on the Alabama River, was finished in 1970.

That may have truncated the sturgeon's usual upstream travel before spawning. A sharp drop in the sturgeon population began in the 1980s.

Alabama sturgeon have been studied very little. By the time they were formally identified as an individual species, the Alabama River system had been impounded and the species decimated.

From what they know of sturgeon and large freshwater fish, scientists believe Alabama sturgeon need to swim up long stretches of river before spawning.

A century ago, Alabamians caught tens of thousands of the primitive-looking fish, which have pointed snouts, are brown-orange and have what look like plates on their upper backs instead of scales.

A mature Alabama sturgeon weighs 2 to 3 pounds and is 18 to 30 inches long.

Battle for protection:

The Alabama sturgeon sparked one of the nation's bitterest environmental battles, beginning in the early 1990s. A business alliance argued against listing the fish as endangered, arguing it would threaten barge traffic and other uses of the river.

In 2000, a Montgomery environmental lawyer prevailed in his lawsuit to require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the sturgeon as endangered. Two years later, the only Alabama sturgeon then known to survive died at the Marion Fish Hatchery.

To avoid another such death of the fish caught in 2007, scientists returned the sturgeon to the river.

Rider said he and a colleague at Fish and Wildlife have been fighting for more grants to continue searching for the rare fish. They have found money that will be available in October and are eking by until then.

Rider said he doesn't know whether he'll get the funding he needs to put two biologists in the water, four days a week.

But he said this is probably the species' last chance.

"We know where this fish is located, where he likes to hang out in the summertime," Rider said. "I want to get a concentrated effort."