OUTDOOR CORNER: ENDANGERED STURGEON DATES 70 MILLION YEARS

Have you ever wondered if there are any fish in our rivers today that lived during the prehistoric period?

Have you ever seen a pallid sturgeon and wondered why it looks so different?

The pallid sturgeon lives in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, where it evolved from a group of fish that were dominant during the late Cretaceous period, 70 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

There are three species of sturgeons in Missouri: lake, shovelnose and pallid.

The pallid sturgeon has a flattened shovel-shaped snout, bony plates on its back and long reptile-like tail. It even looks like a dinosaur. It looks similar to its common cousin, the shovelnose sturgeon. Like other sturgeon, the pallid's mouth is toothless and positioned under the snout for sucking small fish and other food items from the river bottom.

The pallid sturgeon can weight up to 80 pounds while the shovelnose reaches a maximum of only five pounds. Even though pallid sturgeon may reach 50 years of age, both male and female may go three to 10 years between spawning.

Pallid sturgeons are adapted for living close to the bottom of large, shallow, silty rivers with sand gravel bars. They lived for millions of years in a natural river system. These waters had been meandering, braided channels and back waters that provided different depths and flow velocities.

Fishermen used to catch pallid sturgeons that were six feet long, but today populations of the pallid sturgeon are so low that the big fish are rarely caught by anglers. The primary reason for their decline is believed to be habitat loss caused by man.

Dams have modified flows, turbidity and lowered water temperatures. The river habitats of the Missouri and Mississippi also have been altered by construction of dikes that narrow and deepen the rivers and cut off backwater areas. These activities drastically changed the sturgeon's habitat.

Pallid sturgeon have managed to survive over the millennia, but now their future is uncertain. In 1980, the pallid sturgeon was added to the Federal Endangered Species List, which is reserved for species in danger of extinction. This makes it illegal to catch and keep a pallid sturgeon.

In order to save the 70-million-year-old fish, the Missouri Department of Conservation has stocked and tagged sturgeons in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in and effort to pinpoint the exact cause of their demise. We also cooperate with the commercial fishermen and ask them to report their catch of all sturgeon species. Other researchers are studying pallid sturgeons as well. If recovery efforts are successful, the fish may be taken off the Endangered Species List and once again be available for sportfishing.

Species interact in complex ways, and survival of all native species in a given region is an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. Like a canary in a coal mine, the plight of the pallid sturgeon serves warning that the overall health of the ecosystem has suffered.

Christopher Kennedy is a fisheries management specialist for the Missouri Department of Conservation.