Ancient Fish Given New Life

May 30, 2009

Release from: Giles Morris
The Rhinelander Daily (Wisconsin)

The lake sturgeon, the Great Lakes region’s oldest and largest fish species, has had its age-old life patterns disrupted by the construction of dams on the river systems they make home. The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have undertaken a major effort to bolster the populations of the fish, which has a place of cultural prominence in their traditional teachings.

Butch St. Germaine, director of the LdF Fish Hatchery, speared a world record sturgeon measuring just over seven-feet long and weighing 156 pounds out of Pokegema Lake in the early 1980s. He and Larry Wawronowicz, the tribe’s natural resources director, decided that re-populating tribal waters with lake sturgeon should be a priority.

“We always had sturgeon in the waters here, but they hadn’t been showing up like they used to. So Larry and I got together and started talking. ... It’d be nice to get some back in the lakes. Larry wrote a grant and we got funded for three years. I thought we did pretty good on it. Hate to see it come to an end,” St. Germaine said.

The LdF hatchery and natural resources departments have partnered with the UW-Milwaukee’s Water Institute, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, the Wisconsin DNR, and the Genoa National Fish Hatchery to take native spawn from the Yellow River and the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage for the purpose of growing them in breeding ponds and releasing them into tribal waters.

“This was a rehabilitation process in order to re-establish lake sturgeon in the Lac du Flambeau chain of lakes,” Wawronowicz said.

The Lac du Flambeau reservation contains some 260 lakes, 71 miles of creeks and rivers, and 24,000 acres of wetlands. Maintaining the biological diversity and ecological health of this traditional waterworld is the responsibility of the LdF’s natural resources department.

Fish, particularly game fish, have been a source of economic development for the reservation, an important indigenous food source, and a link to traditional cultural relationships with the natural world.

The three-year grant program geared to re-establishing the sturgeon population was the latest project for the tribe’s hatchery program, which began in 1936. The new hatchery facility, constructed in 1999, houses breeding tanks, a high-volume water filtration system and a complex of fish culture ponds used for growing the fish to size. The facility can pump 5,000 gallons of water per minute.

The hatchery spawns walleye, muskellunge, brown and rainbow trout, white suckers and lake sturgeon. The lake sturgeon program has allowed the tribe to study the fish’s habits of movement. Each fish bred at the hatchery carries an embedded chip with an identification number that will allow the tribe’s natural resources staff to track their movement and growth in the future.

While many sturgeon are released as fingerlings, others are kept and nurtured to a larger size. Wawronowicz explained that his staff used a surgical procedure to insert transmitters to track their movements after releasing 20 fish in the winter and 20 in the summer into Fence Lake.

The results of the tracking program didn’t produce any conclusive results. Some fish moved and others didn’t. The fish were deeper and more active in the summer than in the winter.

Sturgeon remain mysterious members of the fish world. They are huge, relatively unafraid of humans, and typically curious. Wawronowicz did say the fish typically grow to larger sizes in lakes than in rivers.

“They have a tendency to grow a little bit faster in a lake system than a river system because they are constantly fighting the current in a river system,” Wawronowicz said.

Wawronowicz said he has enjoyed working with the sturgeon for the past three years, and his experience has reinforced the traditional notion that the sturgeon has wise and friendly characteristics.

“They are a pretty neat animal. They are very docile. If this was a tank of walleye they’d be over there skirting around. These fish, especially when they’re young, are very docile, very inquisitive, sort of neat,” Wawronowicz said. “They porpoise and turn around. They’re not too afraid of being handled. We have a thing around here saying they’re almost dog-like in nature.”

Sturgeon are benthic feeders, using barbels close to their mouths, which are located on their undersides, to help them forage for food. Before dams were constructed on the Wisconsin River, lake sturgeon moved freely throughout the Mississippi River basin. A fish spawned in Lake Pokegama could have ended up in New Orleans. The sturgeon’s size, their ability to migrate over great distances, and their habitation of deep, murky waters have led to an air of mystery around this magnificent fish, and for the Ojibwe people, that mystery is a crucial element in the relationship between humans and the natural world.