Sturgeon Days May Be Numbered In Alabama Waters

December 9, 2007

Release from: Sean Reilly
Press-Register (Alabama)

ON THE LOWER ALABAMA RIVER - Each time Steve Rider ventures out in search of the Alabama sturgeon, he lives in hope of netting what is now one of the nation's most imperiled fish. He knows, though, that the odds of success are bad and growing worse.

"Twilight is setting on us getting this species," Rider, a normally upbeat state fisheries biologist, said last month after another fruitless quest on a stretch of river about 60 miles north of Mobile. Despite thousands of man-hours dedicated to the search, only a handful of the fish have been found in the last decade.

The most recent catch -- made in April by Rider and two other Conservation Department employees -- was the first by researchers in almost eight years. After an initial flurry of excitement, that discovery has not led to more. Among biologists, concern is mounting that too few fish remain in the wild to make a captive breeding program possible.

Should the sturgeon disappear, it would be the first Alabama fish species known to go extinct in more than a century. It would also mark a bitter end to an epic legal and political battle dating back to 1991, when the sturgeon was first identified as a distinct species and worries about its potential impact on commercial waterway traffic began to circulate.

The sturgeon's decline is emblematic of a "biological meltdown" in Southeastern rivers, said Kieran Suckling, policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental organization that supported the endangered species listing, finally made in 2000. "We all have blood on our hands."

Suckling's list of culprits includes the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for not moving faster; a politically influential industrial coalition that has steadfastly fought federal protection for the sturgeon; and conservationists who didn't seek safeguards earlier, when the fish was more abundant.

About 30 inches long and weighing 2 to 3 pounds, the brassy orange Alabama fish with a tapered snout is one of just 25 sturgeon species in the world, said Bernie Kuhajda, collections manager at the University of Alabama. Once found in approximately 1,000 miles of the Mobile River basin, it is now confined to about 130 miles of the lower Alabama River in Monroe, Clarke and Wilcox counties.

While scientists attribute its initial decline decades ago to overfishing, they believe that the damming of many state rivers has since interrupted the fish's spawning cycle.

As a biological family, sturgeon have a lineage reaching back to the days of the dinosaurs, according to Kuhajda. That pedigree has won the Alabama sturgeon little respect from the state's political and business establishment.

"We don't want this ugly fish in the state of Alabama," Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford once declared.

For six years, the industry group known as the Alabama-Tombigbee Rivers Coalition has waged a legal campaign to get the sturgeon off the endangered species list, in part on the grounds that it is not genetically distinct from the Mississippi shovelnose sturgeon. After a federal appellate court rejected that argument in February, the coalition's hopes of a reversal now hinge on whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case. A decision could come as early as this month.

If federal officials had accepted the coalition's argument, its attorney Bill Satterfield said, "you could actually inter-breed that fish here with the Mississippi shovelnose."

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the coalition also argued that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service cannot list the sturgeon as endangered through the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce because the fish now turns up just in Alabama and has no economic value.

Throughout the controversy, scientists have never stopped looking for the sturgeon, Rider said. And because it is so rare, their hope has been to find a reproductively active female capable of spawning in captivity. The fish found in April just below Claiborne dam is an older male.

Via an implanted sonar tag, that fish has been closely tracked ever since. That monitoring has yielded fresh knowledge about the sturgeon's habits -- it ranges widely at night, for example -- but has yet to lead to other fish. The discovery also prompted the Conservation Department to step up its search.

Late last month, for example, Rider and fisheries technician Travis Powell went "electro-fishing" on a short section on the Alabama River in a remote area of Monroe County as well as checking four large hoop nets put out the day before.

The nets, two of which had to be wrestled off snags, were mostly empty. Electro-fishing involves briefly stunning fish to bring them to the surface. Although paddlefish, freshwater drum and minnows bobbed up through the muddy water, there was no sign of a sturgeon.

It was a typical day, Rider said later, after the state survey boat was winched back on to shore. Asked about Ford and others who have disparaged the sturgeon's importance, Rider politely demurred.

"It's a big circle; we are part of this environment," he said. "This is our fault really, what's happening here."