Sturgeon symposium under way

More than 375 leading scientists from 23 countries will converge on Oshkosh this week to share the latest research on the world’s sturgeon populations and see firsthand why the numbers of Lake Winnebago’s sturgeon have quadrupled in the last 40 years while populations of this ancient fish have collapsed in many other countries.

The International Symposium on Sturgeon runs through July 8-13 at the Park Plaza International Hotel and Conference Center in downtown Oshkosh. The symposium will feature scientific presentations and workshops and presentations on law enforcement and public involvement.

Participants will visit a site on Wolf River where state fisheries biologists will use electrofishing boats to bring lake sturgeon to the water’s surface to be netted, tagged and measured; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Great Lakes WATER Institute, a laboratory that studies sturgeon; and the Menominee Indian Reservation, where symposium participants will learn about the Menominee’s’ cooperative effort with state and federal government to restore lake sturgeon to their tribal waters.

“This symposium provides a forum for leading sturgeon scientists, natural resource managers and aquaculturists to come together to share information and learn from one another and from the successful management program we have here,” says Ronald Bruch, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources sturgeon biologist and member of the symposium steering committee.

Fred Binkowski, University of Wisconsin Sea Grant aquaculture specialist and another member of the steering committee, said that the symposium will help set the future course of research and management worldwide for a species that “desperately needs help in many parts of the world and in our own country.”

Twenty-five different species of sturgeon cruise the waters of the northern hemisphere, relics from 100 to 200 million years ago that have survived since the time dinosaurs roamed the earth, Bruch says. Now, many of these sturgeon species teeter on the brink of collapse in the Caspian Sea, in Europe, and in some parts of the United States. Poaching, dam-building, pollution and habitat loss have all taken their toll, Bruch says, with poaching becoming rampant in some parts of the world.

“Sturgeon are very good at surviving,” Bruch said. “They can survive drought, climate changes, food shortages. One thing they cannot survive, though, is overharvest. They’re very sensitive to too many of them being taken out of the population.”

Demand is greatest for female sturgeon, which produce the eggs from which caviar is made. However, females are slow to mature sexually. Lake sturgeon, for instance, do not spawn until they are 20 to 25 years old and then only every three or five years, although some other sturgeon species mature sexually at an earlier age.

Binkowski, also a senior scientist with the WATER Institute, thinks that symposium participants will be receptive to the fish management model they’ll see at work in Wisconsin.

“I think that the majority of them will be going back to their respective countries with a clear understanding and a better appreciation for preserving the wild resource and not necessarily putting the emphasis on commercializing it,” says Binkowski, who has conducted sturgeon research at the WATER Institute for the past 20 years.

Historically, lake sturgeon were found in most of the major rivers systems in Wisconsin and all of the state’s boundary waters, which would include Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Green Bay, and the Mississippi River, Binkowski says.

But lake sturgeon populations were decimated in the late 1800s by commercial fishermen who regarded the gigantic fish as a nuisance because they tore the nets used to catch more commercially valuable fish. Fishermen then realized lake sturgeon had many uses – for caviar, meat, leather, oil, glue, and a gelatin that could be used for making jams and jellies and for clarifying alcoholic beverages-and fished them until their populations plummeted. For the past 70 years, Wisconsin has allowed a limited recreational spearing season on Lake Winnebago and a brief hook-and-line season for lake sturgeon populations on the Lower Wisconsin River and on other waters supporting a self-sustaining population.

“The key to the success story of having the largest and healthiest lake sturgeon population in the world in Wisconsin has to do with two main issues,” Binkowski said. “Good biological management and good, strong law enforcement regulation. ”