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The first time Jennifer Simard saw lake sturgeon, she was as a teenager visiting the Moose Cree Homeland with her family. They stumbled on a group of the fish, namew in Moose Cree dialect, stranded in a spillway, designed to help prevent dams from overflowing but often dangerous to aquatic species.
“They were in these little pools, and their dorsal fins were sticking out of the water. They wouldn’t have lived there long — and it was hot too, because it was July,” Simard said. “Something would have eaten them eventually, or they would have died there.”
Simard and her family began to move the fish, each about three or four feet long, back to the river. They used bins they had in the truck at the time, usually meant for moving wood and harvesting other animals and fish. She remembers returning about 10 fish to the river that day. Her family knew what they were doing, but moving these massive fish isn’t recommended for the average person.
“[The species] was really explained to me by my family as something really special, and something that my relatives survived off of in the past,” Simard said. “That was my first interaction with sturgeon and, over the years, I’ve gotten to learn more about them and how much more they have to share.”
In Ontario, lake sturgeon is a culturally significant and nutritionally important species for many communities. It is listed as a species at risk across the province, and endangered in the Great Lakes. According to Parks Canada, the current population of lake sturgeon is perhaps just one per cent of what it once was.
The largest freshwater fish in the Great Lakes, they can grow up to two metres long and weigh up to 200 pounds. It’s also Ontario’s oldest fish — its ancestors swam among dinosaurs 200 million years ago — but that legacy could blink out without help and dedicated conservation.
After her rescue mission as a teenager, Simard went on to become an ecologist and later co-founded the group Learning From Lake Sturgeon. It’s a partnership between the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada and Moose Cree First Nation, where Simard is now the director of Ontario Power Generation relations.
Moose Cree First Nation owns a 25 per cent share in the $2.6-billion Lower Mattagami River hydroelectric project, completed in 2014, and the Crown corporation owns the remainder. Learning From Lake Sturgeon studies the impacts of human activities and dams on river ecosystems, including the North French and Mattagami rivers, through scientific research and First Nations perspectives. Part of its foundational mission was “to show our people that we were going to be involved in a new way,” Simard said.
The province has recognized the ample dams in Ontario can act as barriers to lake sturgeon’s movement, especially during spawning. It has also noted the dams can unintentionally pull fish, eggs and larvae into water intakes, where they can be injured, killed or stranded. Simard and the Elders’ advisory group guiding her organization are bringing more information to light.
“We’ve been noticing that some of the fish are not as healthy around the dams as they are compared to other areas where there aren’t any dams. They look skinnier; their heads look big, their bodies look small,” Simard said, adding Learning From Lake Sturgeon’s studies of fish blood have shown high levels of stress.
Another big threat to lake sturgeon is habitat fragmentation, or the destruction of an ecosystem into smaller, isolated pieces. It’s a leading cause of species loss in Ontario, and can disrupt migratory fish like lake sturgeon from moving freely to places with ideal food and shelter.
As it turns out, the Moose River basin, where Simard studies the species, hosts the healthiest population of the fish in Ontario, she said.
“They’re endangered and extinct in so many other places,” Simard said. “The pressure is on us not to lose that standing as the last stronghold of a healthy sturgeon population … That’s something we can’t take for granted, and we have to be vigilant.”
The first time Nikki Commanda saw a lake sturgeon, nm’e in Anishinaabemowin, she thought it was a shark.
“It was the biggest fish I had ever seen,” Commanda, a species at risk biologist at Nipissing First Nation, told The Narwhal. The massive fish was swimming in front of her grandparents’ home on Nipissing First Nation territory, kilometres from an important spawning habitat. She was a child then, but it sparked a lifelong interest in the species, its history and future.
Lake sturgeon has been “revered,” Commanda explained, as an important food source for Indigenous peoples for more than 2,000 years. While the meat and eggs were highly prized food, the entire lake sturgeon was used for a wide range of purposes. Sturgeon skin was used to make containers; oil from the intestines was used as a soothe for sore joints and a cure for scratchy throats; the sticky substance from the air bladder was used to fix canoes. Families gathered at lake sturgeon spawning sites in the spring for ceremonies.
When settlers arrived, the species was treated differently, and unsustainably. From the late 1800s, commercial fishermen on the Great Lakes over-exploited lake sturgeon for meat and caviar, and sometimes just treated them as pests caught in their nets.
“They would even use the sturgeon to throw in the steamboats as fuel. There was this total disregard for a species that lives a lot longer than humans,” Curtis Avery, a board member of the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre told The Narwhal.
Their exceptionally long lives, in some cases 150 years, means it takes a long time for lake sturgeon to mature and reproduce, making the population especially vulnerable when fish are harvested too soon. Now, nearly 20 years after legal commercial fisheries closed to conserve lake sturgeon, the species still struggles to recover its numbers.
But, Avery, a former fisheries biologist and now environment manager at Nipissing First Nation, said there are reasons to be optimistic. Pulp and paper mills, which threatened important habitats by polluting waterways near Avery and Simard’s homelands alike, have closed, allowing water quality to slowly improve. Commercial sturgeon fisheries in Ontario closed in 2009, and most lake sturgeon sport fishing has been banned since 2010. Some Ontario anglers have faced $3,000 fines for catching the fish out of season.
“A lot of the damage has been done, and now it’s a recovery game,” Avery said. “It is about saving and protecting the habitat they already have.”
Both Nipissing First Nation and Learning From Lake Sturgeon in the Moose Cree Homeland are monitoring the species for long-term improvements, but as many as 50 years will be needed to determine the trajectory of the species’ recovery. In the meantime, though, the Ontario government says, “the population trajectory is listed as increasing” and more cautiously suggests “there is a possibility of a modest recovery.”
“It is a promising situation,” Avery said, adding that his last assessment caught a reassuring amount of sturgeon. “In a couple of years, we might see the delisting of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence populations [from its endangered status]. … These things have survived two, three mass extinction events since they’ve been alive. They’ve survived us, and I think they’ll continue to survive.”
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