Protecting an ancient beast

The monster is a living fossil. It has bonelike plates instead of skin that are sharp enough to cut. It roots along like a feral hog, nosing a snout that has whiskery barbels like a catfish. It sucks food into a tubelike, toothless mouth.

And if you’re in the water in the Lowcountry, the Atlantic sturgeon may well be in the murk below. Nobody really knows. The six-foot long fish is so reclusive that there are no good estimates of its numbers, and that’s led to a debate in the scientific community. The environmental advocate Natural Resources Defense Council has petitioned to make the ancient critter an endangered species.

The petition comes two years after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — spurred by concerns among fishery professionals that the sturgeon was being wiped out — conducted a status review that concluded the fish was likely to become endangered but recommended giving it only a threatened status along northern half of the East Coast.

Federal environmental officials didn’t act on that recommendation, said Brad Sewell, an NRDC attorney. The petition forces them to act. NRDC wants the fish declared endangered along most of its range and threatened along the rest. In South Carolina, sturgeon would be declared endangered from the Santee-Cooper river system north and threatened from Charleston south.

“The ACE basin (south of Charleston) is one of the areas where it’s doing relatively well,” Sewell said. But overall, the population has not recovered from centuries of over-fishing.

The sturgeon is one of the oldest species of fish still living and the largest fish on the East Coast that swims between fresh and salt water. With no teeth, it doesn’t bite bait, so it’s rarely caught. The torpedo-shaped fish are bottom muckers, so reclusive that most people aren’t aware they are there — only to be startled by the fishes’ mysterious, rocket-launch leaps straight out of the water.

The sturgeon is thought to eat marine worms. Nobody knows what effect it or its absence has on the bottom habitat.

“One thing about Atlantic sturgeon, they are so depleted scientists haven’t figured out exactly what they do in their habitat,” Sewell said.

The fish was once plentiful enough to be a cash crop for the Jamestown colony in Virginia, so thick in the Hudson River in New York it was called “Albany beef” at the turn of the 20th century, when 3,000 tons per year were being netted along the East Coast. By the time a moratorium was put in place in 1998, the catch had dropped to one ton per year, even though the roe sold as caviar for $250 per pound.

Federal officials said no to putting the sturgeon on the Endangered Species list in 1998 because the moratorium was already in place, set to last at least 40 years to allow a generation of the fish, and its offspring, to mature and spawn.

Bill Post, the S.C. Natural Resources diadromous fish coordinator, has studied the Atlantic sturgeon along in the state’s coastal rivers. In the Edisto River, the largest of the three rivers that form the ACE Basin between Charleston and Beaufort, the numbers of the fish have stayed about the same year-to-year, based on incidental catches during netting surveys of the shortnose sturgeon, an endangered species. Good numbers are found during similar surveys in the PeeDee/Winyah Bay basin.

“The trend seems to be increasing,” he said. “We really don’t have data to tell us that the population has rebounded (since the moratorium). Until we get a better handle on what’s going on, it’s hard to say whether it ought to be listed. But that (takes) research dollars and they are hard to find right now. I see enough Atlantic sturgeon that I don’t think they should be listed as endangered (in South Carolina). Listing them as threatened, that wouldn’t hurt my feelings.”

Source: The Post and Courier