Did you say? Did you say that not to put our seatbelts on?
Is that in case we fall through the ice?
That is in case the truck, for some silly reason, goes through. That
should not be the case today.
We're cutting 24 to 26in of ice.
But pressure cracks do open up.
Silly things do happen.
Ice fishing for sturgeon is an extreme sport.
Adult sturgeon are the biggest fish in Lake Erie.
Baby elephant sized. They can live more than a hundred years.
They're an ancient freshwater fish.
More dinosaur than trout.
And when I say dinosaur, I mean they literally were here millions of
years ago. Made it through the dinosaur extinctions all the way through Lake Erie
being declared dead in the 1960s to now.
They're still here. This is beyond the shore from Michigan public.
I'm Rebecca Williams. This is the third of five stories about the Great Lakes.
One story per lake. A sort of snapshot, a little microcosm of what makes each lake
unique. Chapter three Lake Erie and the dinosaur
comeback kid fish. Comeback fish.
This story is brought to us by Kate Furby, Michigan public's environment reporter.
It starts in northern Michigan, pretty far from Lake Erie.
I remember watching a Bear Grylls survival show with my mom as a kid.
It was about how to survive if your car goes off a bridge,
how to cut your seatbelt and break the window as you sink into the water.
It really stuck with me for a long time.
I even had a tool in the driver's side door of my car that would help with that.
Okay.
Let's talk about safety.
I was the unofficial safety person in my lab in grad school.
My first ever documentary film job was as science writer slash safety diver.
I don't know why everyone else isn't obsessed with staying alive,
but it occupies a lot of my thoughts.
I mean, if the ice really makes the sound, you're supposed to get down on all fours so
you're less of a less of a point.
One point going through.
Okay, that's me going through a bunch of worst case scenarios with my co-producer,
Jodie Westrich. I thought I was prepared for this trip.
We've come up to Black Lake in northern Michigan on a snow packed February weekend to
see the lake sturgeon.
It's an ancient fish. Kind of reminds me of a cross between a Ninja turtle and a Roomba.
If both of those things could live over a hundred years.
We've just arrived at the annual Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree.
It was made even more famous last year when the sturgeon fishing season only lasted 17
minutes. Hundreds of people registered to fish,
but only six will catch one.
We've probably known Jason Odersky and Scott Williams exactly five minutes before they
generously offer to drive us out on the lake to see the ice fishing shanties.
They're both involved with the nonprofit Sturgeon for tomorrow that's running the
Shivaree. And on top of everything, the weather out on the lake is Antarctic like
it's -20 or something with wind chill.
So I had been feeling pretty lucky to get a ride in a warm car at first,
but now I've been quietly eating my feelings in the back seat before I find the courage to
ask Jason about the seatbelts.
Did you say. Did you say that not to put our seatbelts on?
Is that in case we fall through the ice?
That is, in case the truck, for some silly reason, goes through. That
should not be the case today.
We're cutting 24 to 26in of ice, But pressure cracks do open up.
Silly things do happen.
Very low. Very low percentage.
But in case that does happen.
It's not zero.
That is not zero. We are on ice.
That is.
Wild. This looks.
Amazing though.
You're you're currently over about 18ft of water.
Wow.
Oh, okay.
Okay okay.
Okay.
Once you're over 60, don't matter.
Okay.
It's all the same difference when the truck goes, yeah.
It's all the same difference when the truck goes through.
As in you and your truck can die in six feet of water or 18.
Silly things do happen.
So when Jason says, don't put your seatbelt on.
My mind goes straight back to that survival show and that car sinking in the water.
Only now it's also going under ice.
How you doing, Keith?
That's good. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a true Michigan experience. This is yeah, this is like what? This is like my
fourth week in Michigan.
Where did you move here from?
California.
Oh, you poor girl.
So I just moved here from California for this job as Michigan Public's environment
reporter. And those laughs are not comforting.
Okay. What are we doing here?
A question I'm sure Jodi is also asking herself as we bump along in a stranger's
truck over, hopefully completely frozen ice.
Black Lake is in northern Michigan, and in the late 1990s,
the Michigan Department of Natural Resources decided that the Sturgeon population needed
help. Numbers were crashing.
A stocking program was created in 2001, but the community really came together to.
And so scientists, tribal agencies, volunteers.
They created a series of programs and organizations working together to promote and
support the fish, and now they are stable enough.
We only allow six fish to be taken out of this lake due to population restraint.
This season goes very fast and is very limited.
You've almost got a better chance of hitting the Powerball.
And this is why Jason and Scott took us out to show us the incredible ice fishing setup,
so we could see the event, understand the role of sturgeon in one
community up close and personal.
Black Lake was an education in how one community can rally around a fish,
how ice fishing can bring people together on the darkest days.
Definitely the coldest days I've ever experienced.
But to learn more about the sturgeon itself and the science behind its restoration,
we need to go south to Ohio.
Have you.
Touched the sturgeon.
Before? Never.
My first time.
It was also my first time.
It's so cute. I can't believe that they just come up to you. Oh.
It's so cool. They just are bumping into our hands.
Not bothered. They're like, whatever.
They are not what I expected.
They're really. They're really soft.
Rebecca, Jody and I are at the Sturgeon Touch tank at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio.
The zoo's campus is sprawled out near the Maumee River,
which feeds into Lake Erie.
We're here with Matt Cross.
He's the director of vertebrate conservation at the zoo.
Part of the really cool thing about Lake Sturgeon is they're one of these iconic fish
in the Great Lakes and Lake Erie.
They're our largest fish.
They also get to be 6 to 8ft long.
They can weigh hundreds of pounds. So there was one caught in the Detroit River, I think
2020, 2021 that was seven feet long and like 200 plus pounds.
Like they get to be big.
So you can see the fish swimming around here.
They've got like this built in armour.
And so when they're young, you can see on these smaller fish it sticks
out more. It really protects them because nothing's going to want to put that in their
mouth or very few things.
As they get bigger, it kind of smooths out.
But they're, they're still they're, they're very well protected fish. So once
they get to this size you know, barring any accidents,
like nothing's going to be eating them.
And that's part of what is that part of why they grow so fast at the beginning. They're
trying to get basically like it's a race to get bigger than the biggest fish's mouth.
Yep. Get race to get no longer bite size.
The race to get bigger than bite sized.
Because as a baby fish, almost anything can eat you.
But if you can get bigger, even if that's just by using some tall spines
or by growing super fast when you're small, then you are harder to swallow,
literally. And once they're adults, they're the largest thing in the lake.
I've seen these egg mats from some of these females, you know, 30 females that are,
if you can imagine a grouping of eggs, that's the size of me.
Wow. And if you had hundreds of thousands of fish like that,
this would have like, those eggs would have been an absolutely
insane, like, positive nutrient source and food source for everything in the river.
So not only is he an iconic species, there are also a very important species for a
lot of organisms in and around the rivers.
One of the things Matt showed us was the zoo's streamside sturgeon rearing trailer.
It's just what it sounds like.
A little trailer right next to the Maumee River.
It pulls river water into the tanks where they house the baby sturgeon all summer.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But one of the reasons they do this is because they're threatened.
Sturgeon is a common name for a group of fish that exist around the world,
not just in Lake Erie, from the Adriatic Sea to the Sea of Japan.
But one thing that they all have in common is that they're threatened.
All species of sturgeon are listed as vulnerable or endangered,
but we think that the Maumee River and Lake Erie.
Historic populations were special.
People have said that you used to be able to walk across the Maumee River on Sturgeon when
they would come back to spawn. Now, that's obviously an exaggeration,
but, you know, probably akin to something like the passenger pigeon,
where there were so many of them in there that you could like see them visibly.
And so this used to be a major spawning population for the lake sturgeon here for
Lake Erie.
The Lake Erie watershed has been through so much,
but Lake Erie is actually the most biologically productive of the Great Lakes.
It's the smallest by volume, but don't let that size fool you.
It supports something like 50% of all of the fish that we see in the Great Lakes.
But that productivity and the massive amounts of life that makes it vulnerable.
They were, you know, they're large fish.
They're strong when they get caught in nets, you know,
you were hand making nets back then.
If you get this monster sturgeon that tears your net, that's cutting into your bottom
line. So sturgeon were seen as a nuisance to settlers.
Sturgeon are an important fish for the indigenous people who live and lived in the
Great Lakes region in this instance.
Now we're talking to Matt about the way the settlers were interacting with and harvesting
the sturgeon around Lake Erie.
They were clubbed, thrown up on land.
So we hit them really hard.
So we almost eliminated sturgeon from the Great Lakes by In less than 100 years.
Sturgeon in North America were not recognized as important to settlers at first.
It wasn't until the mid to late 1800s that people realized they could make a commercial
fishery selling sturgeon caviar from Lake Erie.
And so they initially harvested heavily for their caviar.
And so, as we've seen with a lot of other species,
when you start removing, especially females from the populations,
you have a really rapid extinction vortex.
And so extinction vortex.
Yeah. You kind of get like in these as you start to get lower and lower numbers,
you get trapped into this like downward spiral,
right? Like you're flushing a toilet. Wow. This whole ecosystem focus,
thinking about how everything's interconnected, kind of like a game of Jenga,
right?
They are working hard to return the sturgeon to its rightful place in the waters.
This is a big task. Matt Cross is part of a research group working on lake sturgeon
reintroduction. It's a group effort with a long list of partners,
including the Toledo Zoo, but also the Genoa National Fish Hatchery in
Wisconsin, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, among others.
So part one of this project is catching the sturgeon in the spring,
right when they're ready to spawn and then combining their eggs and sperm in containers,
fertilizing them kind of IVF style.
Then the researchers have to care for the thousands of baby fish.
I used to joke when we first got sturgeon that my wife became a single mother for two
weeks because it was, you know, I'd be in there 16 hours a day
working and doing things now.
Like 50 other babies to take care of.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now, this is.
Basically a head start program for baby sturgeon.
Collect them in the spring, raise them in hatcheries,
care for them all summer until they're big enough to not be so bite sized.
Release them in the fall.
But before we go on, I gotta explain the sturgeon life cycle for a second.
As adults, they mostly live in lakes, but then they reproduce in rivers.
And that's where the baby larval fish, juvenile fish,
that's where they grow up. Then they move into the lakes again as they get older.
So this fish has a built in migration as part of its life cycle.
But it's also weirdly a homebody.
At the end of the day, they tend to go back to the waters they're
from, and this is called imprinting.
It's kind of like how ducklings imprint on their mom,
but then also totally and completely different.
But basically there's a window of time where the sturgeon cue in on an understanding of
their home waters. Chemical cues smell even and they will navigate back there later in
life. For this Head Start program, half of the 3000 now fertilized fish eggs are
trucked up to the Genoa Hatchery in Wisconsin for their six months of pre-K,
and the other half stay here in the zoo trailer down by the river.
And this is part of an experiment to understand how Sturgeon imprint to test the
results of being raised in a hatchery unattached to the waters they'll call home as
adults, versus being raised in the trailer that is fed with the river water itself.
So to compare these two different groups of little fish,
Sturgeon restoration is a multi-state multinational effort.
There are projects happening across the Great Lakes region by so many groups.
Our story is just focused on this one, working to restore the western Lake Erie
population and its connection to the Maumee River.
After the break, we head to the Detroit River Fish Lab to learn more about how sturgeon
move around the Great Lakes watershed.
This is beyond the shore.
I'm Kate Furby. After visiting the Toledo Zoo,
we went to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Detroit River Fish Lab.
We met with Jordan McKenna, another scientist working on the Maumee
Sturgeon reintroduction.
She showed us around the warehouse facility.
If you want to see our other boats, we have two other grass carp boats that are
called diploid and triploid.
Which are so a fish can or can sexually reproduce.
They're called diploid fish. And when they can't, they're called triploid fish. So those
are the names of our boats. And then we have another one called Temple of Boom, which is
our electrofishing boat that our eyes team uses to sample for invasive species and
native species.
Jordan did her master's thesis on the Maumee River Lake Sturgeon restoration,
and she's been involved in tagging and tracking them across the Lake Erie watershed.
We met with her to learn more about the Maumee River's reintroductions of the
sturgeon, why this place has been chosen for the project.
So we know that historically in Lake Erie that there were 19 sustainable spawning
populations prior to the early 1920s, and those fish,
unfortunately were removed to pollution, overfishing and then habitat degradation over
time. And so we haven't seen fish in the Maumee River for over a century.
So this led the scientists into developing a plan to reintroduce the lake sturgeon to the
Maumee River. But once enacted, because of the long and migratory life of a
surgeon, they won't really know if it's worked for another decade or so until the
baby sturgeon they've released are mature enough to spawn themselves.
So until then, how do the scientists solve the mystery of where the sturgeon go after
they're released?
These are seven inch fish.
You know, we're not going to catch them with any type of gear.
Seven inch fish. Because remember, these are just little newly released
juveniles. They've spent the summer in the Genoa hatchery or the zoo streamside sturgeon
trailer. And now they're out on their own.
But scientists like Jordan want to follow them and see what they do next.
And one of the ways they do this is with an existing giant array.
Galactose. Galactose stands for the Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System.
It's a big underwater grid of sensors that get little pings from the tags that Jordan
and her team use on the sturgeon.
So it picks it up through sound. And then we get a timestamp of when that fish was there.
And then we have the GPS coordinates.
So we can kind of create a movement pattern or and track these fish once they're
released.
Jordan says. This works like a fish toll road pass.
Each fish gets a little tag with a unique ID,
like a toll pass token, basically.
And then as they swim near the receivers, it pings like a little toll booth and the
scientists get a notification of where they are and when.
Everybody loves what we call like the blue dot animation,
but these are pretty cool.
This is just showing like detections over time.
And these pings are being visualized by a series of tiny blue dots that dart around a
map of Lake Erie and the Maumee River.
If you're not watching on YouTube, there's a cute retro looking map with pixels
representing all the tagged fish little dots that dart around the map,
but truly not as far or as fast as you might think.
And now we're getting into March.
So they really don't. Whoa, whoa, look at that one.
Okay. It is extremely fun to watch the little fish ping all the toll booths,
and it's a great way for the scientists to visualize what's happening below the surface
of Lake Erie and the Maumee River, to get a glimpse at how their project is
going in real time.
So we see them through the entire course of those first,
you know, six months of life.
And it's cool, like having a part in reintroducing this historic fish that used to
be here everywhere, but they've been around for over 100 million years.
They've lived through the pollution, but they made it and they've survived this
long. It's just they they need a little bit of help or a lot of help from us to ideally
bring back those populations.
Jordan McKenna and Matt Cross are just two people who are part of a much bigger project,
but they both emphasized the community part in all of this.
They talked about the big release party they have every fall,
a Sturgeon launch party.
Here's Matt Cross from the zoo.
Again.
We invite people out to help us release the fish bucket by bucket.
We have our partners come out and have educational booths.
We have food trucks, live music games.
Really make it a community event that people can look forward to annually. I think people
see it as this legacy.
We're leaving our children because these fish will outlive us and it's just a really,
really fun event.
But there are actually a lot of parties for this fish.
Like I found more than ten different sturgeon festivals advertised online.
Sturgeon have a long life and many seasons to celebrate.
And that brings us back to Black Lake and the Sturgeon from the beginning of this story.
The annual famous fishing with a high chance of drinking chivalry.
Side note the only other time I've heard the word chivalry was from my dad.
He's from Illinois, and he used to tell stories about his parents throwing newlyweds
in a pond. I think I looked it up and the definition of a shivaree is a raucous party
celebrating a newlywed.
And this is definitely a raucous party celebrating a fish.
I know. Time for a little ice fishing music.
Teardrops and wax urns in the bowl.
And mix your farts and car hearts.
My cheeks are frostbitten.
Every year they crown.
One angler, the king, the person who catches the biggest of the six
fish that were harvested that season.
Make some noise for your 2026 Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree King.
But I think the real star of the event was about six inches long and doing smooth,
slow laps in a small tank at the back of the tent.
His name is courage.
So these are the two we have.
This is hope and this is courage.
California.
And I just brought courage because that was the first one I I grabbed,
you know, the kids get to name them.
The fifth graders named them.
Courage is a nine month old sturgeon, an ambassador to the human race from his own.
Maybe he's in a small tank on a table in front of an.
Douglas an is the director of Sturgeon in the classroom.
It's a K through 12 program that's part of the Sturgeon for Tomorrow nonprofit running
the Shivaree and set up at the back of the entertainment tent.
At the front of the entertainment tent is a man singing about fishing.
So he was born last May.
Back in a messy divorce.
He got a worker's comp case tied up in court.
He can't move and I can vouch for that.
He's my brother in law.
He's from Saginaw.
They got him. He's drift larva.
Before I left for this trip, I joked that it would be great to get some
Phish themed music playing, and by the end of the weekend I was sick of
songs about drinking and fishing.
It was hard to hear all the lovely people we wanted to talk with.
In October, Sturgeon for Tomorrow delivers the sturgeon to the classrooms and then you
can use them for, you know, social studies because of the cultural
significance and then biology in general.
Third graders, we talk about vertebrates, so you can use them straight through for all
the grades. But then we release it in back into the black River where they came from in
May.
Remember, the sturgeon can live a hundred years or more.
So that means all the humans involved in their research,
conservation education, none of them will live to see their baby
sturgeon get old. They all do this work, hoping future generations of humans will be
there to continue it.
They're threatening the state. They are coming back. I mean,
there's there's definite population growth going on.
So we're just going to keep working on it. But also they're long lived.
So that's why we need to get the kids involved.
And that's why we went with Sturgeon in the classroom so that the kids,
the kids will take over for me.
I think it's so powerful to do science like this collaborative,
cooperative.
Science that takes years and years.
It takes a lot of humans a lot of time to make change like this,
and you just can't do it without courage and hope.
And I'm not just talking about those darn cute little sturgeon either.
This is a massive effort.
And on top of that, to not be able to live long enough to see the results.
It kind of reminds me of the scientists who were working on the Mars efforts,
and might not live to see it either.
It's that scale. And listen, a lot of this mess is from mistakes made in
building industries without understanding how it would impact the future,
without first considering the ecosystems we live in,
and thus we get a toppled Jenga tower.
It's easy to knock it over, but it takes much longer to put it back
together. So now restoration is happening one block at a time.
It's much easier to break an ecosystem than it is to fix it.
But the scientists and community members we heard from in this piece are all working to
repair the damage. One Jenga block at a time.
Thousands of fish per year.
It's amazing to see these dinosaurs continue to survive for future generations.
Next time on Beyond the Shore, we continue to explore the human connections
to these lakes through the Lake Superior ties that span generations.
One of the things with our youth groups that was it was beautiful to hear,
was that somebody brought up about what?
About the fish, like, what do they want?
And I really felt like they heard that, that we're sharing this landscape with other
beings. And they have a right for decisions too.
We'll hear about the 1.1 billion year history of one of the world's largest lakes,
and hear from tribal members who remain at stewards.
Kate Ferbey and Jody Westrich reported and produced this episode with editing from me,
Jody Westrich, Dustin Dwyer and Vincent Duffy.
Special thanks to Randy Kast, J.
Carl Ganter, Corey Wyckoff from the Toledo Zoo,
Jordan Gillig and Lucas van Deutschland for additional footage.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by blue Dot sessions.
I'm Rebecca Williams. Beyond the shore is a production of Michigan Public.
You can find all of our podcasts at Michigan public.org slash.