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Lake SturgeonWisconsin is the home of one of the last viable lake sturgeon populations in the country. Lake sturgeon can grow to over 9 feet long, and weigh more than 300 pounds. One specimen was thought to live to be over 150 years old! Lake sturgeon populations are declining throughout their native range, and are listed as threatened in 19 out of the 20 states they inhabit. Reasons for their decline are overharvest and habitat loss due to dam construction. Skip navigatio Genoa has been rearing lake sturgeon since 1995, in an effort to reintroduce lake sturgeon to two different sites that have been cut off from their spring upstream spawning migrations. Each spring, wild broodstock are collected using large dipnets along known sturgeon spawning habitat. Females are gently stripped of their eggs and males are milked for their milt on the riverbank. The eggs are fertilized, stripped of their adhesive coating, and brought back to the station and placed in egg jars to begin their early life cycle. Once the eggs hatch, in roughly 5–7 days, they are moved to fry rearing tanks. Fry will feed off their yolk sac for 7–10 days, then microscopic artemia (brine shrimp) larvae are introduced to the tanks. After 45–60 days, the fish are weaned onto bloodworms (frozen midge larvae). They will be grown to 6–8 inches, then released in the fall of their first year. Predation on fish that have grown to 6 inches has been shown to be much less than in earlier life stages. Lake sturgeon are very slow to reach maturity, and may take up to 22 years for females to reach maturity. They also do not spawn every year, but commonly skip a year or even two between spawnings. This is another reason why wild sturgeon populations are slow to recover from adverse events. In 2002, Genoa produced 29,000 fall fingerlings averaging 6 inches long, and provided them to three ongoing restoration programs.
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service |
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