World Rivers Day

Maybe this could be a good thread for reflecting on the state of our rivers?

Sturgeon have been around for over 200 million years, well before the arrival of some dinosaurs. But four species in BC have been designated ‘endangered.’ ...

Gantner and his team of colleagues tracked down ten sturgeon corpses in a little over a week, until finally there was one more to get — a mammoth two-metre fish weighing around 100 kilograms. 

They hauled it into the boat and wrapped it in a tarp before transporting the sturgeon to a walk-in freezer in their Prince George lab that Gantner says “is getting filled up pretty quickly with the full-sized fish.” The last giant joined six others in the freezer. The remaining four were too old to bring into a lab but samples have been collected.

But the specimens yielded few clues immediately. There were no obvious net scars. No hooking injuries. Or wounds. 

And so the race is on to figure out what is killing the Nechako white sturgeon in suddenly large numbers. And to find out whether those deaths in B.C. are tied to other spikes in sturgeon losses in Idaho, California and other places.

The mystery is being tackled by a network of sturgeon researchers who are enlisting the help of the public. Last week the province put out a call asking people to report any dead sturgeon sightings in the Nechako region.

An ancient creature already endangered

The white sturgeon of the Nechako River are a genetically distinct population whose survival has already been labelled tenuous. They stay mainly in the Nechako River, sometimes venturing into the Upper Fraser. Unlike its neighbours in the Fraser River, the Nechacko white sturgeon is experiencing “recruitment failure,” or the inability to reproduce in the wild, as a result of impacts to the watershed, according to Steve McAdam, a biologist with B.C.’s Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship who has studied the fish for more than 20 years.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/09/13/Nechako-River-White-Sturgeon/