Just for a moment, queue up that menacing, impending-doom duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh soundtrack from "Jaws" while thinking of that description of the shark.
Physically, it perfectly illustrates the white sturgeon species common to Northern California and the West Coast: the tiny black beads-for-eyes, way too small for its gargantuan body and useless in the murky depths where it lurks.
And though the white sturgeon is no man-eater like the great white of the film, there's one more thing before we leave Amityville for the Sacramento River Delta. It's that telling scene when Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) turns to hired shark-killer Quint, a cigarette rolling port to starboard across his lips, and says: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
That would be good advice today for anybody hoping to land a sturgeon, nicknamed "diamondback" for its skin's darkly beautiful design, and prized in these parts for its size and prehistoric pedigree.
Sturgeon, you see, can reach a length of 20 feet, longer than your typical fishing boat. Kevin Yost, owner of Lucky Strike Fishing, specializing in fishing for sturgeon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, has caught sturgeon over 10 feet long as recently as 2007. He's talked to commercial divers who while working near Mare Island have seen sturgeon much larger.
These behemoths swim mostly unseen under the noses of folks living and playing around the Sacramento River, the Delta and San Francisco Bay.
Plenty of sturgeon far larger than the official, 968-pound, 9-footer have been pulled from the Sacramento River. Just last year on the Fraser River in British Columbia someone caught and released an 11-footer.
The only reason the record has not been broken is that all states that are home to the largest of the species – the white sturgeon – have adopted regulations that forbid the taking of fish above a certain size (5 feet, 6 inches in length in California). Fishery regulators believe the largest sturgeon are females, which may not reach spawning maturity until they are 15 years old and may spawn only once every four to 10 years.
When they do spawn, they can produce 100,000 to millions of tiny eggs. They go up the rivers to spawn in the early spring and can stay into June. They typically frequent the main stems of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, although a few might head up the Feather River when flows are high.
Not so sharky
Before you go into a panic and run down the streets of Old Sacramento screaming "Sturgeon! Sturgeon!" (Doesn't have the same ring as "Shark! Shark!" does it?), you should chill.
A sturgeon's size, eyes, and other characteristics (skeletal structure like a shark's: cartilage rather than bones) are similar to a shark's. Its heritage, too. Sturgeon have been swimming virtually unchanged, like sharks, since dinosaurs walked the earth. No wonder sturgeon are called living fossils.
But there are important differences. Unless one fell on you or you had a heart attack trying to land it, sturgeon are harmless to humans.
The most important distinction between a sturgeon and a shark is at the business end – the mouth. Sharks, particularly meat-eating sharks like the great white, have teeth, lots of them, that are made for cutting and shredding.
At best, a sturgeon could try to lip or gum you. Its mouth is guarded by four white, rubbery barbels that form a picket fence in front of it. The sturgeon relies on these sensors to find and snarf up just about anything that will fit through its suction hose: clams, crawdads, eels, small fish and the eggs and body parts of larger fish.
That's it for offense. The only defense of the fish is its ability to escape and those diamond-shaped, armorlike plates that line its body.
Fished and protected
Sturgeon have long been coveted by humans for their caviar (salt-cured fish eggs). Europe's nobility and rich have savored caviar since the 1400s.
Lots of people in the United States have developed a taste for it, too – so long as their wallets are fat enough. A 1-ounce tin of caviar from farm-raised white sturgeon can be bought at Corti Brothers in east Sacramento for $69.99. That's $1,119.84 a pound, and it's not even the prized and now, sadly, rare, Beluga caviar.
