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Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old:Scientists rethinking how to save them
Some of the lake sturgeon swimming around in the Great Lakes today may have been alive when Samuel de Champlain first reached Lake Huron more than four centuries ago.
New research suggests these ancient-looking, armoured fish may live far longer than scientists previously thought — in some cases, more than 400 years.
But despite their extraordinary longevity, lake sturgeon — which can weigh up to 180 kilograms and grow up to two metres long — have barely survived us. In Ontario, lake sturgeon are listed as a species at risk, and endangered in the Great Lakes specifically.
Overfishing and destruction of their spawning habitat wiped out an estimated 99 per cent of the lake sturgeon's historic population. More than a century later, populations in parts of the Great Lakes still rely on human beings raising and releasing young fish to help them recover.
The new study uses more than four decades of data from lake sturgeon caught and recaptured across the Great Lakes, suggesting recovery could be a much longer project than scientists anticipated.
"We're pretty comfortable saying that there are potentially 400-year-old lake sturgeon swimming around," said Ed Baker, a fisheries scientist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources who led the study.
Traditional estimates suggest lake sturgeon can live for as long as 150 years. But figuring out how many birthdays a sturgeon has had isn't as easy as counting candles on a cake.
Scientists have typically estimated a sturgeon's age by counting annual growth rings in a cross-section of its fin ray. But the older a sturgeon gets, the more slowly it grows — and the harder those rings become to distinguish.
Instead of counting growth rings, Baker and his colleagues used 44 years of capture data to calculate how much individual sturgeon grew between one capture and the next — then modelled how long it would take them to reach adult size.
In one remarkable case, a male sturgeon measured 117 centimetres when researchers caught the fish in 1990. When the same fish was caught again 34 years later, it had grown just seven centimetres, or about 0.21 centimetres per year.