‘Living fossil’ fish may be spawning

Scientists and students embarking on a census of Georgia lake sturgeon have found three females with mature eggs — an indication that the armored “living fossils” may be reproducing in the state for the first time in half a century.

“It’s exciting because it’s confirmation that they are becoming mature and trying to spawn,” Martin J. Hamel, an associate professor at the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, said in a recent news release.

Fossils indicate that the spade-nosed fish with a bottom-mounted vacuum hose instead of jaws has existed for more than 136 million years, scientists say.

One of nine sturgeon species and subspecies found in the U.S., lake sturgeon live in 18 states and five Canadian provinces in the St. Lawrence, Hudson Bay, Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Pollution, habitat destruction and harvesting for flesh and caviar have so diminished their numbers that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering federal protection for the species.

Sturgeons’ bone-plated bodies did so much damage to fishing nets that commercial fishers hauled large numbers out in the 1800s, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources recounts on its website.

Dams, which keep the big fish from migrating from lakes to the rivers where they spawn, also reduced their numbers. Now lake sturgeon are at less than 1% of historical levels.

By the 1970s, lake sturgeon had been wiped out of northwest Georgia’s Coosa River basin — the only place where they were found in Georgia.

State protections, such as fishing limits, and stocking programs, some run by Native American tribes, have helped sturgeon.

The state Department of Natural Resources began reintroducing lake sturgeon 20 years ago, Hamel said.