----

The Genoa National Fish Hatchery (NFH) has been involved in lake sturgeon propagation since 1995 to support restoration efforts in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri.  In 2007, the Genoa NFH raised approximately 30,000 seven inch lake sturgeon using natural diets that cost many thousands of dollars.  Using natural diets for feeding sturgeon has several draw backs including decreasing supplies and increasing costs, labor intensive preparation and feeding requirements, potential chemical contamination in the feed and the possible disease transmission from the feed.

Genoa NFH biologist Nick Starzl and maintenance worker Jeff Lockington recently designed and constructed an experimental fish rearing battery which has been put into operation to evaluate the suitability of replacing natural food diets for rearing lake sturgeon with commercially formulated diets.

The current study is evaluating a Rangen® semi moist diet and an Otohime®  larval fish food diet against the standard natural diet.  The diets are being evaluated with three replicates each for a total of nine tanks. 

If a particular diet is found to be promising future studies will refine its utility with the hope of converting it to a production scale use.