Louis Watershed coursing through Minnesota and Wisconsin, white pine logging disrupted migration, says Brian Borkholder, the fisheries biologist with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Waterways carved out to allow bigger ships or to provide construction materials lost their pebbly bottoms, the preferred hiding places of newly-hatched sturgeon. Dams sliced migration pathways into pieces. Ĭonstruction projects damaged sturgeon populations too. From 1895 to 1905, the numbers in Lake Eerie fell 80 percent. Fishers in the Great Lakes pursued the fish even more aggressively. The perception flipped in the 1860s: Smoked sturgeon meat and the fish eggs, better known as caviar, became popular menu items. Boats eventually caught lake sturgeon strictly to stack the carcasses on beaches to burn. Commercial fishing, which took off in the Midwest in the early 1800s, saw sturgeon as massive nuisances that shredded nets meant to catch other fish. And compared to how long lake sturgeon have lived in North America, the time it took white settlers to eliminate the fish from some waterways was remarkably fast.

The group now contains 27 species, only one of which - the lake sturgeon - is native to the Great Lakes. Researchers think that sturgeon first evolved about 200 million years ago, putting them alongside dinosaurs at a time when land began breaking into today’s continents.

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