Biology, Management, and Protection of North American Sturgeon

Can We Study Sturgeons to Extinction? What We Do and Don’t Know about the Conservation of North American Sturgeons

David H. Secor, Paul J. Anders, Webster Van Winkle, and Douglas A. Dixon

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569360.ch1

Should we be surprised that none of the eight species of North American sturgeons are yet extinct? Sturgeons co-existed with dinosaurs and have survived the cataclysmic ecological effects of asteroid blasts. Why then should we be concerned? The conundrum of sturgeon is that despite their resiliency through evolutionary time, they are particularly sensitive to harvesting and habitat degradation (Boreman 1997; Gross, this volume; Secor and Niklitschek 2001). If there can be a single generalization about sturgeons, it is that they tend to be poky at life: their heart beats slowly; they respire slowly; they move deliberately, mature slowly, reproduce infrequently, and are slow to die. These conservative life history traits have served sturgeons well over geological time scales. For instance, in naturally-recruiting populations, it does not matter if one year’s, or the next year’s reproduction is a wash. In most sturgeon populations, recruitment during subsequent years, or even during subsequent decades, contributes to population persistence.

Given that sturgeon species keep loping along, why are scientists, managers, and others in such a rush to restore them? To paraphrase a famous quote, ‘old sturgeons don’t die, they just fade away.’ First, the species becomes commercially extinct; then, sightings of large adults becomes less frequent, until sightings become so rare that they are written up in the local newspaper. And then, there are none, and the public is prone to forget there were ever sturgeons at all. Such was the experience in Maryland, where no one seemed to notice the disappearance of populations of Atlantic sturgeon in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay until the 1990s, after nearly a century of slow decline. To be sure, an industrial scale fishery catalyzed the decline of Atlantic sturgeon in Maryland and elsewhere in the late 1800s (Secor, this volume). Still, Atlantic sturgeon populations did not give it up with a large crash; they just faded away over several generations of Chesapeake Bay watermen, scientists, and managers.