A tall tale about a fish that happily got away
University of Windsor professor Trevor Pitcher has been preaching Great Lakes conservation efforts for years, especially when it comes to endangered lake sturgeon.
So in the wake of leading last week’s ribbon-cutting for the university’s new Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre, Pitcher was called upon two days later by concerned Windsor Utilities Commission officials to practise firsthand what he preaches.
WUC officials on Friday were facing a fish crisis when they discovered a large lake sturgeon caught in a holding tank inside the Albert Weeks Water Treatment Plant.
The fish, nearly two metres in size and weighing about 80 pounds, had been pulled in by the flow of Windsor’s water intake pipe across from Belle Isle and was too large to turn himself around in the tight confines.
The fish continued to swim against the flow to avoid getting caught in WUC’s debris separating process, and eventually would have become overcome with fatigue.
But a heads-up phone call by Wayne White, WUC’s manager of water production, who read about Pitcher and the new research facility, brought the instructor — just named acting director of the school’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research — and a couple of grad students to the scene.
Still dressed in a suit jacket from meetings earlier in the day, Pitcher donned waders, climbed down a rickety ladder and was able to lasso the rear of the fish inside the tank about six metres deep. That allowed about a half-dozen WUC workers and grad students to hoist the fish out.
The sturgeon was placed inside a large cooler, which Pitcher uses as part of his research, transported in his vehicle to the Detroit River on the city’s east end and released.
“It was an adventure,” Pitcher said on Monday. “I talked with a couple of my grad students and we never heard of anything like this. When we got there you could see it was kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
Climbing down the “rusty ladder” into the water-treatment pool was “daunting,” he said.
“It was a worthy cause since we have very few individual (sturgeons) able to reproduce,” Pitcher said. “We talk all the time about saving the species and this was first-hand action.”
Lake sturgeon often live to more than 100 years of age with Pitcher guessing the distressed fish was about 60 with plenty of reproductive years left, so saving him was invaluable in the fight to protect the species, he said.
He guessed the fish simply got caught up in the flow of the intake while pursuing smaller fish.
The sturgeon was distressed, but otherwise in good condition as it swam away quickly when released into the river, Pitcher said.
The rescue also provided quite a fish tale for everyone involved.
“This was very unusual,” said Gary Rossi, vice-president of water operations for WUC. “We don’t get fish this size coming up in our intake pipe. Smaller fish come and go, but with a fish this big it was too tough to turn around.
“We thought we better get somebody in — it was too large a fish for us to handle and we don’t have the proper equipment. We saw the article on the research centre, so we gave (Pitcher) a call.”
Once the fish was roped in the tank it was “fairly easy” to remove with so many people on hand, said Rossi, who noted everyone was aware of lake sturgeon being a species at risk.
“We all went home feeling good about the situation,” he said. “It’s just kudos to (White) and his crew acting on this to deal with it properly.”
One of the grad students, Jason Lewis, 26, who is pursuing his PhD in environmental studies under Pitcher, described it as “exciting” to participate in such a unique fish rescue.
“We brought a bunch of stuff, but the nets we had were not big enough,” Lewis said. “It was really cool how we were able to hoist it up out of the pit.
“Through our work at (GLIER) we know how important they are, so it was exciting to save a sturgeon that otherwise would not have survived.
“Hopefully, it will go on to live many more years.”