The Wisconsin BIOLOGIST Who REBUILT An ANCIENT American FISH Nobody THOUGHT Would RETURN!

[00:00:00]On a cold February morning on the frozen surface of Lake Winnebago in east central Wisconsin, a man in insulated coveralls sits inside a small wooden shanty over a rectangular hole cut through 19 in of ice. Below the hole, in the dark water underneath, he cannot see much. The winter sun is filtering through the ice in pale green columns. A five-pronged spear rests across his lap.

[00:00:31]He has been sitting here for 6 hours. He has not moved. What he is waiting for is a lake sturgeon. If one appears, a torpedo-shaped fish with rows of bony plates along its sides, a shark-like tail bent slightly upward on one side, and a set of four whisker-like barbles dangling from its chin. He will have between 1 and 3 seconds to make his decision. He will lift the spear. He will judge the fish's size against the outline of his mental checklist. And if the fish is large enough, he will drive the spear down through the water and end its life.

[00:01:14]There are exactly 500 people who have been given permission to do this in the 2026 spearing season, which begins on the 14th of February. and runs for a maximum of 16 days. When the collective harvest cap is reached, usually around 1,000 sturgeon, the season closes and every fish that comes out of the ice is measured, weighed, scanned for a passive integrated transponder tag and entered into a database that has been continuously maintained since the middle of the 1950s.

[00:01:51]The database and the harvest and the fish itself are all improbable because the lake sturgeon under that hole, a species that has existed in more or less its current form for over 130 million years, which means it was already an ancient lineage of fish before the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, was 100 years ago being systematically wiped out of the Great Lakes ecosystem. system at a rate that most fisheries scientists of the era believed would end in complete extinction.

[00:02:29]I'm Edmund Hail and this is the story of a Wisconsin fisheries biologist who spent 38 years of his professional life on the recovery of a fish species that most Americans have never heard of. a lake in east central Wisconsin that now holds the largest self- sustaining population of that species anywhere on Earth and a February spearing tradition that against every reasonable prediction of 20th century biology is now in its 80th consecutive season.

[00:03:04]But before we get to the biologist, we have to deal with an uncomfortable piece of ecological history. Because what happened to Lake Sturgeon in North America between roughly 1850 and 1915 is one of the least remembered mass exterminations in the history of American wildlife.

[00:03:25]Lake sturgeon acupenza full vessins is the largest freshwater fish species native to the Midwest and Great Lakes basins of North America. Adults typically grow to between 4 and 6 feet in length and weigh between 40 and 200 lb though records exist of individuals exceeding 7 feet and 300 lb. They live for over 100 years.

[00:03:53]Females do not reach sexual maturity until roughly age 25 and they spawn only every 3 to 5 years thereafter. They are in the specialized vocabulary of fisheries biology one of the slowest reproducing large vertebrates in the North American freshwater system.

[00:04:14]Historical population estimates place the pre-industrial Great Lakes Lake sturgeon population at approximately 15 million individuals. From roughly 1850 through the early 1900s, American and Canadian commercial fishing operations extracted somewhere between 3 and 4 million pounds of lake sturgeon per year from the Great Lakes basin. The eggs went to European caviar markets. The meat went to smoked fish markets in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The oil rich bodies were in some documented cases stacked on river banks and burned as fuel by fishing crews who had no other use for them. By the year 1900, the lake sturgeon population across most of the Great Lakes had collapsed. In some tributaries where the fish had been catastrophically abundant a generation earlier, spawning aggregations had ceased entirely. In others, individual fish continued to appear, but the reproductive dynamics had been disrupted so severely that natural recruitment had essentially stopped. Today, the lake sturgeon population of North America is estimated at approximately 1% of its historical size. The species is listed as threatened or endangered in 19 of the 20 American states within its original range, except in Wisconsin.

[00:05:46]Wisconsin, essentially alone among the states around the Great Lakes, did something in 1915 that nobody else did.

[00:05:55]It closed the sturgeon harvest statewide.

[00:05:59]Not for a season, not for a year. It closed the fishery entirely.

[00:06:05]The closure held through the First World War, through Prohibition, and through most of the Great Depression. When the harvest was eventually reopened in 1932, it was reopened as an economic recovery measure. And it was reopened under strict conditions that included size limits, seasonal restrictions, and volunteer citizen monitoring of the spawning grounds.

[00:06:30]That combination of early legal protection and community-based citizen engagement is, according to the peer-reviewed literature that has since accumulated, what saved the Wisconsin lake sturgeon population.

[00:06:45]Everywhere else, the fish collapsed and in most places did not fully recover. In Wisconsin, particularly in the Lake Wnebago system, a shallow windswept freshwater lake fed by the Fox and Wolf Rivers in the east central part of the state, a remnant population survived the crash.

[00:07:07]But surviving is not the same as recovering. And in 1977, when a young Wisconsin college graduate named Ronald Brookke took a summer job as a Creole census cler with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Winnebago Sturgeon population was still nowhere near its historical abundance.

[00:07:30]What Brooke had walked into, though nobody involved in the department at that time was thinking about it in these terms, was the beginning of one of the longest single scientist conservation careers in the history of American freshwater fisheries.

[00:07:46]Ronald Brookke, Ron in the state's professional community, spent the next 38 years of his life working for the Wisconsin DNR.

[00:07:57]He rose through a series of positions.

[00:07:59]Habitat technician, fisheries biologist, supervisor, section chief, statewide planning coordinator, and finally in the last years of his career, fisheries bureau director for the entire state.

[00:08:15]But the work he is best known for and the work that occupies the central span of his professional biography was the lake sturgeon recovery in the Winnebago system which he took over as senior fisheries biologist in 1986.

[00:08:32]What Brooke did with the Winnebago Sturgeon over the following three decades has been documented in peer-reviewed journals in a Wisconsin Historical Society press book published in 2009 and in the ongoing operational records of the DNR, but it can be summarized briefly in three parts.

[00:08:54]First, he expanded the population assessment program. Every year, DNR staff and volunteer biologists caught, measured, tagged, and released thousands of individual sturgeon during the spring spawning runs on the Wolf and Embaris rivers where the Winnebago fish returned to reproduce.

[00:09:16]The database that eventually accumulated with tag histories on tens of thousands of individually identified fish became one of the most detailed long-term population records for any large freshwater fish species in the world.

[00:09:33]Second, he built out the volunteer program that guards the spawning grounds each spring. The Winnebago sturgeon spawning migration attracts in April and May of most years groups of ripe adult fish that concentrate at rocky shores along the Wolf River for several weeks of intense reproductive activity. During those weeks, the fish are in the practical vocabulary of poaching enforcement extraordinarily vulnerable.

[00:10:00]Brook's team recruited citizen volunteers, many of them local anglers who had grown up with the spearing tradition, to camp along the spawning grounds around the clock during the spawning season, watching for illegal harvest and providing a physical presence that essentially eliminated the poaching threat that had once been catastrophic to the population. Third, he documented the behavior and biology of the species at a level of detail that had never previously been achieved.

[00:10:30]Between 2004 and 2009, Brook and his colleagues implanted radio and acoustic transmitters in 177 adult Winnebago sturgeon and tracked their movements throughout the spawning cycle. In collaboration with an acoustic ecologist named Chris Bocast at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, Brook also produced the first detailed recordings of the low frequency spawning sounds informally called sturgeon thunder by the researchers that adult sturgeon produce during reproductive aggregations. These infrasonic sounds, most of them below the range of ordinary human hearing, break the surface of the water during peak spawning and can be felt as a low vibration on the deck of a research boat over the spawning shores.

[00:11:20]The peer-reviewed publications that emerge from that period, including a book co-authored by Brook with Kathleen Schmidt Klene of UWC Crant and Fred Binowski of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2009 under the title People of the Sturgeon, Wisconsin's Love Affair with an Ancient Fish, have won multiple national awards and have become the foundational documentation of one of the more successful large vertebrate freshwater recoveries in modern North American history. And I want to be clear about what actually happened. The Winnebago Lake sturgeon population by the time Brook retired from the DNR in early 2015 had become the largest self- sustaining population of the species anywhere on Earth. Not one of the largest, the largest.

[00:12:17]Estimates from ongoing DNR mark recapture work place the adult population above 60,000 individuals which for a fish with a 25- year age of first spawning and a 3 to 5 year interspawning interval represents a recovery that no fishery scientist working in 1977 would have considered plausible. The Winnebago population has now also become the source stock for restoration efforts across a large portion of the species historical range.

[00:12:49]Eggs from adult Winnebago females are shipped under permit to hatcheries in Milwaukee on the Monomony River on the St. Louis River at the western end of Lake Superior and in the past several years to reintroduction programs as far away as Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The fish that Wisconsin protected in 1915 are now, in a very direct biological sense, the parents and grandparents of the fish that are being reintroduced to river systems where the species had been locally extinct for over a hundred years. I want to acknowledge at this point a parallel body of work that has been going on for roughly the same length of time, roughly a thousand miles to the east of Winnebago. Boyd Kinard, a migratory fish biologist who spent most of his career at the United States Geological Surveys Conte Anadimos Fish Research Center in Turner Falls, Massachusetts, is one of the world's leading researchers on a related species, the short-nosed sturgeon, Asipensa brevi rostrm, an anadimous fish that lives in the Connecticut, Marramac, and other Atlantic coastal rivers of the eastern United dates Kinard's work on the Connecticut River short-nose sturgeon, including a foundational 1985 telemetry study published with Jack Buckley in the transactions of the American Fishery Society that established the annual migration patterns of the species provided much of the scientific basis for the federal short-nose sturgeon recovery plan that has been in operation since the 1990s.

[00:14:32]Kinard's advocacy in particular was central to the eventual installation of an operational fish passage system at the Holio Dam on the Connecticut River, which had been blocking sturgeon migration since the middle of the 19th century.

[00:14:49]Kinard retired from full-time research around 2010 and founded a small engineering company called BK Riverfish with his son Brian which develops improved fish passage systems for dams around the country. He is still working on the problem from his lab in Millers Falls, Massachusetts, more or less every day.

[00:15:13]Now, I'd be doing you a disservice if I made this sound like a completed victory across the entire range of North American sturgeon because it isn't. And the honest complications are worth being direct about. Outside of Wisconsin, lake sturgeon recovery has been much slower.

[00:15:34]Most Great Lakes tributaries, where the species was historically abundant, now hold populations that are, according to the peer-reviewed literature, either impoverished or dependent on ongoing hatchery supplementation for their continued existence.

[00:15:51]The recovery in Wisconsin is a genuine outlier, made possible by the 1915 protection that no other state matched at the time. Where the fish had already been depleted below a reproductive threshold before serious protection began, natural recovery has been much harder to achieve.

[00:16:12]The species also faces a new pressure that Brook and his generation of biologists could not have predicted when they started their careers.

[00:16:22]Lake sturgeon are cold water fish. Their reproduction is timed to a temperature window that opens for a few weeks each spring as river water warms into the range that triggers spawning.

[00:16:36]As freshwater temperatures across the North American continent shift under climate change, the timing of those windows is beginning to move.

[00:16:46]Peer-reviewed work published in 20125 documents measurable stress on lake sturgeon reproductive biology under warming conditions in several Great Lakes tributaries.

[00:17:00]Whether the recovery of the past four decades can be maintained under the temperature conditions of the next four decades is at this point genuinely open.

[00:17:11]The Monomonye tribe whose reservation borders the Winnebago basin and whose members have participated in the recovery of the Lake Sturgeon in Wisconsin for essentially the full duration of Brook's career has been running its own triballed restoration project at Clam Lake and other tributaries where the species had been extated.

[00:17:34]Monomony elders have described the lake sturgeon in cultural terms that place the species at the center of the trib's relationship with the surrounding freshwater ecosystem.

[00:17:45]The tribal involvement in the ongoing recovery is not a supplementary or optional element of the story. It is one of the reasons the story exists.

[00:17:57]Brook himself, since retiring from the DNR in 2015, has continued to work on sturgeon research as a part-time scientist at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. He co-authors peer-reviewed papers with a new generation of researchers, including Margaret Stadig and Ryan Kernigs at the DNR, who are now running the Sturgeon Assessment Program. He built the book he wrote with Schmidt Klein and Benowski in 2009 is still in print. The volunteer program that guards the spawning grounds each spring is still operating. The February spearing season on Winnebago is entering its 80th consecutive year.

[00:18:42]Step back and look at the whole ark and it is quietly staggering. A fish species that was once functionally exterminated across most of North America. A single state that closed the fishery in 1915 and never fully reopened it. a biologist who started as a Creole census cler in the summer of 1977 and spent the next four decades building the assessment infrastructure, the community engagement network, the peer-reviewed literature, and the institutional partnerships that allowed the population to become the largest self- sustaining population of the species on Earth.

[00:19:24]and a parallel body of work on the east coast led by a different generation of biologists and centered on a related species that is quietly building towards similar results in the Connecticut and Marramac rivers over the same time frame.

[00:19:41]There is nothing dramatic about the story. There is no single moment where the lake sturgeon was saved. What there is instead is 38 continuous years of one biologist showing up to the same fish species in the same lake system and doing the accumulated work. the tagging, the measuring, the sound recording, the volunteer coordination, the peer-reviewed writing, the tribal consultation, the harvest management, the egg shipments that allowed a population to recover on the time scale that a 100-year-old fish species actually requires.

[00:20:23]The lake sturgeon under the ice on the morning I described at the beginning of this video is in the honest ecological sense the outcome of that work. It is not a dramatic outcome. It is not a photogenic outcome. It is the outcome of a species that reproduces every 3 to 5 years, that lives for over a century, and that requires in the specialized vocabulary of population biology the kind of patience that runs longer than a single human career.

[00:20:56]Ron Brookke is now in his early 70s.

[00:21:00]Boyd Kinard is a decade older. The next generation of sturgeon biologists, Kernigs in Wisconsin, Stadig in the DNR, tribal biologists across the Monomony and Ojiway territories, and younger researchers at Kianadimus Fish Research Center and elsewhere along the Atlantic coast are running the work. Now, the fish in a very real sense has outlasted the careers of the people who saved it.

[00:21:31]If you found this as remarkable as I do, let me know in the comments and tell me whether you think a conservation project that takes 40 years to succeed is actually a success or whether we need to be honest about the fact that some species recover on time scales longer than a single scientific career.

[00:21:53]If this changed how you think about what patience actually looks like in modern conservation work, share it with someone who'd appreciate it and subscribe because there are more of these longer than a career stories out there than the immediate results conservation narrative tends to accommodate. And I've got plenty more of them to tell you. I'm Edmund Hail. Thanks for watching.