Sturgeon Surprises

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

Happy Fishy Friday!

Today’s paper is about lake sturgeon culture methods, but the thing that struck me most about today’s paper is collaboration. The adult lake sturgeon brood stock were collected by USFWS field staff in Michigan, the fish were hatched at the USFWS hatchery at Genoa, Wisconsin, the final part of the project occurred at the Freshwater Restoration Ecology Center in Ontario, and the project was funded by NSERC (Canada). In this time of international relationship challenges, this project highlights the importance of our professional interactions and cooperation.

Lake sturgeon are an imperiled species which are long lived and late to sexually mature. As such, artificial propagation is a strategy to amend wild populations, and this paper investigated methods to enhance the fitness of individuals prior to release into the wild.  Like many research projects, not all of the results were what the authors expected, and many more questions were raised by the end of the assessment. I really enjoyed how the authors placed their work within the context of other research and publications, and strove to explain the differences they found between their work and that of other researchers. Many of the results seemed unusual, and this paper is proof-positive that it is important to share and publish successes and “surprises.” Enjoy!

Effects of physical enrichment on survival, growth, and physiology of captive-reared juvenile Lake Sturgeon (open access)