Re-establish sturgeon spawn success

kickingfrog · September 20, 2016

http://www.nugget.ca/2016/09/19/effort-to-re-establish-sturgeon-spawns-success

TIMMINS - It may have taken nearly 15 years, but the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry is reporting that the project to restore the native lake sturgeon population in the region has been a success.

“People are catching them on the Mattagami River; it’s restricted to a catch and release, and no catching during spawning, but it’s been a success that way,” said Derrick Romain, the MNRF’s planning biologist for the Northeast Regional Operations Division, who has worked on the Mattagami Sturgeon Restoration Project since its inception in 2002.

The project began as a partnership with the MNRF, the Timmins Fur Council and Club Navigateur La Ronde, with financial support from Ontario Power Generation, Lake Shore Gold and Glencore’s Kidd Operations (then Xstrata Copper).

They released 52 adult sturgeon from the Little Long Generating Station to locations above and below the Sandy Falls Dam at the start of the initiative.

Today, after years of work and monitoring, lake sturgeon have begun to re-spawn, with fish being found in areas of the Mattagami River spanning 340 kilometres, from the Moose River upstream all the way to the Wawaitan Generating System downstream.

This is the first successful attempt to restore a sturgeon population by transplanting adult sturgeon from one area to another and then allowing them to spawn naturally.

Researchers in other provinces and the United States have attempted, but been unsuccessful, in their efforts to reestablish a sturgeon population using this method.

Romain said now that the field work is done in Timmins, Trent University graduate student Maggie Boothroyd is doing her thesis work on the findings in order to further evaluate the project’s success and to determine how the methods used here can be applied in other lakes and regions.

“It’s a key research project because it will expand to other segments in the province as this is the only known adult transfer that worked, in the country, the only one,” Romain said. “It particularly pertains to Ontario, because the systems may be different in other provinces, but this one worked. So, the main reason we’re doing this monitoring and research is to determine, why? Why did it work?”

He said they are looking at a variety of factors to determine why the project has been so successful so far.

One of which is habitat, which will include an examination of the spawning grounds that the sturgeon are utilizing.

Questions such as what kind of habitat the sturgeon prefer for spawning and whether they require a single location, or multiple, will be addressed to determine that.

Since sturgeon require a large habitat to spawn, Romain said it also important to be sure that any repopulating projects do not isolate the fish, either — or they will not be successful.

“These fish used to go hundreds of kilometres, especially when they spawn, the young larvae would drift 100, 200 kilometres downstream,” he explained. “So, if you don’t have the sturgeon going upstream, all the way up, to when they can eventually drift back down, then you’ve isolated the population. Then, once you’ve isolated the population, other things will then come into play like pollution, overfishing, and log drives.”

There will also be research into determining if the population is genetically viable and whether there were enough adults transplanted to ensure the population will become self-sustaining.

The species, which was once plentiful in the region, began to go into decline sometime in the 1950s.

In 2008, it was added to the Species at Risk list as a species of special concern.

While there has been no definite determination of what was the main driver for the decline of sturgeon in the region, overfishing, pollution, mining and log drives have been cited as contributing factors.

Given the fact that they have only begun disappearing over the last century, Romain said it is imperative this work continues in order to return the species to its natural habitat and improve biodiversity in the area.

“They’ve been here since the time of the dinosaurs,” he stressed. “The glaciers and all those historical events happened, but, whenever the glaciers disappeared from here, the sturgeon survived — so they’ve been here for thousands of years.

“It’s a species that was present at one point and because of our actions, we’ve pushed them out of certain parts of where they were once quite prominent. Some people think it was bound to happen anyway but in my mind, if we’ve done something to cause that and it’s not a natural extinction, lets say, then it’s our duty to try to rectify what we’ve done.”