Swimming with Dinosaurs
You know how we Canadians love our superlatives? Well, here's one that'll make you sit up straight - we've got fish in our waters that literally swam alongside dinosaurs.
Lake sturgeon have been cruising our rivers and lakes for over 200 million years, and they're absolute units.
We're talking fish that can grow longer than a hockey stick, tip the scales at 180 kilograms, and live longer than your great-grandma. The oldest recorded Lake Sturgeon was 155 years old from Lake Huron.
These prehistoric beasts look the part too. Instead of scales, they're covered in bony plates that get less pronounced as they age - kind of like how we lose our edge as we get older.
They've got these whisker-looking barbels hanging near their mouths that help them navigate murky lake bottoms where they hoover up snails, crayfish, and whatever else is down there.
But here's the kicker - the current population of lake sturgeon is perhaps just one per cent of what it once was.
In 1845, fishermen pulled 800,000 kilograms of lake sturgeon from Lake of the Woods alone. By 1957? That catch had dropped to basically nothing.
From Sacred to Scorned and Back Again
Jennifer Simard first saw lake sturgeon - namew in Moose Cree dialect - as a teenager when she found them stranded in a spillway, as she described in a recent interview with The Narwhal. For her people, these fish aren't just big and old. They're sacred.
Indigenous peoples have relied on sturgeon for over 2,000 years, using every part of the fish - meat and eggs for food, skin for containers, oil for medicine, even the sticky stuff from their air bladders to patch up canoes.
Then settlers showed up and things went sideways fast. Commercial fishermen treated these ancient giants like garbage. They would even use the sturgeon to throw in the steamboats as fuel.
Can you imagine? Using a 150-year-old fish as kindling?
The turnaround is happening though, and it's Indigenous communities leading the charge. Moose Cree First Nation is working to have the North French River formally recognized as an Indigenous protected area, studying how namew move through their traditional waters.
Over in Northwestern Ontario, the Dalles First Nation just kicked off their own recovery program, releasing a dozen juvenile sturgeon fitted with transmitters back into the Winnipeg River.
The Science of Second Chances
After conducting a thorough species status assessment using the best available science, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined lake sturgeon do not require listing under the Endangered Species Act. That's not because they're thriving - it's because the recovery efforts are actually working.
Parks Canada is tracking sturgeon movements in Pukaskwa National Park with acoustic receivers, discovering that these fish travel incredible distances. One sturgeon originally tagged in Michigan was detected frequently along the Pukaskwa coast, showing just how far these ancient wanderers roam.
The real heroes might be the hatcheries though. Genoa National Fish Hatchery has a lead role in rearing lake sturgeon, raising more than 60,000 fingerlings per year. It takes about 20 years for these fish to reach maturity, so we're playing the long game here.
What Happens Next
The good news keeps coming.
Commercial sturgeon fishing in Ontario shut down in 2009, sport fishing's been mostly banned since 2010, and those old pulp mills that poisoned the waterways? Many have closed, letting the rivers heal.
But we're not out of the woods yet. Dams still block migration routes, and climate change is messing with water temperatures that trigger spawning. The federal government still hasn't added lake sturgeon to the Species At Risk Act, though Nature Canada says it's under consideration.
The recovery's happening at different speeds across the country. Some populations in the Great Lakes are stable enough to sustain themselves, while others still need help from stocking programs. It's going to take time - remember, these fish don't even start having babies until they're old enough to vote.
But if a fish can survive 200 million years, including an ice age or two, I'm betting on the sturgeon. Especially with Indigenous knowledge guiding the way and science backing it up.
These ancient giants are staging a comeback, one slow-growing fingerling at a time.
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