I live in Oregon and have been fishing for as long as I can remember. While I mostly fished for lake trout, we'd fish for salmon in the Columbia river during salmon season. During the off season (winter) I'd fish for sturgeon.
One year my buddy decided to get serious gear and fish for oversized sturgeon. This was purely catch-and-release, barbless hooks. We would sit on the edge of the shipping lanes because that was the deepest part of the river.
(incoming fisherman story)
One day we hooked a gigantic fish, we were in a 24 foot boat and I swear it was longer than that. We pulled it near the boat to unhook it and the thing was amazing! It was covered in battle scars from boat propellers or something, but the weirdest part was that it had a ton of fishing line hanging out of it's ass. Over the years it must've swallowed hooks and line, and it was just swimming around with literally feet of the stuff.
We retrieved our hook and watched it swim back into the depths. I never went oversized fishing after that, but it was incredible to think how old that fish was, what it had been through, etc.
Columbia River near the dam back in the 90s. A family friend was an underwater diver for the state doing repair work. Very low visibility and deep water along the dam face. He was working down there and something moved. The way he described it was 'I reached out and rested my hand on the wall. Then the whole wall moved, and swam away'.
Kayak fished the St. Croix river last year, on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for smallmouth bass. Crystal clear water. Floated over several huge sturgeon, 4-6 feet long. The way they look, it feels like coming across a dinosaur. Thankfully they're bottom feeders.
Acipenser transmontanus are harmless sucker mouth fish, and lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea.
They are usually strictly catch and release, but in a kayak could probably pull you a great distance. They are deceptively strong for their size, and a big part of local conservation efforts.
400 years is plausible, as they do live a long time when left alone. =3
My fishing story - as a young teen, I "caught" a sturgeon on the Ottawa River (just outside of Pembroke) in a 12' aluminum boat. This was in an area where we'd typically expect to catch bass and northern pike - our fishing net was maybe the size of a large diner plate, and reeling the fish in might take a minute or two.
My father was in the boat with me. After hooking the fish, it took about 20 minutes before the fish was close enough that we could see it from the boat, and identified it as a sturgeon - it was the only time I'd ever caught one. This one was so much bigger than anything I'd caught before. I was using one of those jointed Rapala lures, and it had hooked the dorsal fin. I can confirm the sturgeon could definitely pull the two of us, and the boat, upstream - but not a great distance - just enough to move the boat around.
After about 25 minutes, my line snapped (it may have been 12 lbs test). We didn't really have a way of getting it in the boat in any case, and we would have released it anyway. This was probably the late 80s/early 90s - so nothing captured on a phone camera - it just lives on in my Dad's & my memories...
The local tagged 80 year olds were caught so many times over the years they are surprisingly mellow about the inconvenience once landed in the shallows. Still, takes guts to attempt that in a dingy, as "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" (Jaws, 1975). lol =3
> lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea
To be fair, the towns you're talking about are barely 200-300 years or so I presume? Most other towns in the world are probably older than those towns, and maybe even the fish if it's just 400 years ago :)
To be fair the towns a North American might be talking about could easily date to 400 to 600 years ago at least - with signs of human occupation in the Great Lakes area going back 10-12,000 years before present, a good deal on the present lake floors.
Where I live on the West Coast any towns older than a couple hundred years are long gone, the people were killed or evicted from their land long ago. The existing towns are all new.
Towns are where people live, buildings come and go - Manitoulin Island, within the Great Lakes, still has the Wiikwemkoong First Nation unceded and occupied land, near to which French Jesuits set up a mission in 1648.
I know this is always an unpopular opinion but I just think we as a species should eat far fewer animals. Fish species have been really substantially negatively affected all over the planet by human activity, activities such as bottom trawling and line fishing are hugely destructive (the lines can be tens of km long!) and the whole marine ecosystem is under unique threats from climate change. We don't really know what we are killing and eating, and I am sure we will regret it later on scientifically.
I'm a lifelong plant eater and you can survive very happily, healthily, with lower carbon footprints at all stages of life with it. And if anyone says "protein" or DHA I'll talk all about the pentose phosphate pathway whilst munching linseeds.
It's perhaps not intuitive but it turns out organized anglers have been a big part of rescuing various fish populations. For instance, as a member of the "Backcountry Hunters & Anglers" group me and about 20 other members hiked up the West Fork of Oak Creek in Oak Creek Canyon AZ with heavy backpack tanks filled with (formerly) endangered Apache Trout fingerlings. It was absolutely wonderful to watch the little ones swim away. Trout Unlimited has a ton of conservation efforts including habitat, which helps viability of a whole bunch of other species.
Similarly, you can read the book "People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsin's Love Affair with an Ancient Fish" to learn about how the people around Lake Winnebago came together to restore the health of its native Sturgeon population.
This idea of "othering" human beings apart from the animal world might sound like the most effective way to "help" animals but humans, being complicated, don't work that way.
I couldn't care less what you eat, if it makes you happy, awesome. But there's a whole lot more going on culturally with conservation that is entwined with the evolved nature of human beings.
In the sturgeon case, part of their trouble is habitat loss for their breeding grounds. The wiki linked in another comment says that the cause there is agricultural runoff, although it's not specific if that is plant or animal farming. Being vegetarian might not help the fish much if the farming is still causing the destruction of their breeding grounds.
Seems like you think people catch lake sturgeon to eat them. This is a very rare thing these days. Sturgeon fishing is almost always catch and release. This doesn't mean there aren't any fish killed. Any catch and release is quite stressful and might kill one. But people aren't just eating them and sturgeon are quite robust. And there's certainly no commercial fishing for them like the issues with ocean/marine ecosystems you're describing.
At least in Wisconsin rivers/lakes you cannot legally keep any sturgeon with the normal fishing license. You have to pay an extra fee to keep 1 (per season). And according to the statewide Wisconsin statistics only 5 sturgeon were harvested from the St. Croix River in 2025, and a total of 58 were harvested across the entire state.
Years again I was gifted a sturgeon fishing trip on the Fraser and I still feel bad thinking about it. In hindsight knowing how much we stressed and probably harmed that animal. What a cruel way to entertain ourselves.
If we continued as hunters-gatherers we'd do the same with many other animals, but we instead decided to farm them so the other species can survive.
On the other hand, there are wild boars roaming my country in numbers that should be reduced, but somehow very few people want to eat them and they're causing a problems. Bear meat is a bit more popular, but killing off excess bears is a hot topic every year. Meanwhile horse meat is more easily available over here.
I feel somewhat skeptical of the methods as they were superficially described in this article. Will need to read more later. However, I also have been aware of the demise of sturgeon and I really hope we will get to see their populations return.
It's usually becaise they have lower metabolism so their cells don't suffer as much damage as ours, and they probably have a lot of copies of genes that prevent cancer.
Maybe. But whales don’t get cancer either, and whale metabolism is… impressive (well their resting heart rate is lower than ours but they grow orders of magnitude faster, to a point, and sustain themselves gorging on literal tons of food).
> I wonder if whales survive to an equivalent of human old age (where we can be pretty fragile and still survive for decades).
They do and this is well-documented. They're one of the few (only?) other species where we can directly see the role matriarchs (grandmothers, either past their reproductive ages or even undergoing menopause) have on the development of the youth, and it's been used to explore the role of living post-reproductive ancestors might have on natural selection (which was previously not thought to be affected by it).
Maternal grandmothers have even been found to ~spontaneously regain their milk to help nurse infant whales, iirc.
Humans commonly have grandchildren in their 40s (less so recently of course). We get fragile in our 70s. I'm wondering about living decades in that fragile state, where cancer happens to be a lot more common.
That mostly doesn’t count, since humans still regularly have kids of their own in their forties (so the direct link to natural selection would overshadow any lower-pressure grandmotherly effects), so you’d have to push the window out to the post-menopausal period, which coincides with the period in which various cancers begin to be an issue.
Wonder wtf you were talking about: apparently the US has expanded on their threats to other's national sovereignty, I guess to the surprise of no one:
> Lake Ontario became the center of a geographical naming dispute when U.S. president Donald Trump issued an executive order directing U.S. federal agencies to refer to it as "Lake America" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario_naming_dispute
It's like a TV show, hilarious from the outside but I'm sure dire internally. Good luck y'all.
As far as I can tell, it hasn't been renamed, it's certain individuals and departments of the government that started referring to it as such. Things like that usually happens when the government is interested in making "subtle" threats to the nations surrounding the geographical they've "renamed". Lots of cases of this in history, the US didn't come up with this by themselves exactly.
I live in Oregon and have been fishing for as long as I can remember. While I mostly fished for lake trout, we'd fish for salmon in the Columbia river during salmon season. During the off season (winter) I'd fish for sturgeon.
One year my buddy decided to get serious gear and fish for oversized sturgeon. This was purely catch-and-release, barbless hooks. We would sit on the edge of the shipping lanes because that was the deepest part of the river.
(incoming fisherman story)
One day we hooked a gigantic fish, we were in a 24 foot boat and I swear it was longer than that. We pulled it near the boat to unhook it and the thing was amazing! It was covered in battle scars from boat propellers or something, but the weirdest part was that it had a ton of fishing line hanging out of it's ass. Over the years it must've swallowed hooks and line, and it was just swimming around with literally feet of the stuff.
We retrieved our hook and watched it swim back into the depths. I never went oversized fishing after that, but it was incredible to think how old that fish was, what it had been through, etc.
Columbia River near the dam back in the 90s. A family friend was an underwater diver for the state doing repair work. Very low visibility and deep water along the dam face. He was working down there and something moved. The way he described it was 'I reached out and rested my hand on the wall. Then the whole wall moved, and swam away'.
Poor thing
could it have been taken somewhere to have those hooks and threads removed?
Even better is to not put them there. How sadistic is it to rip the palate and mouth of a fish just for fun and put it back in the water?
Humans are full of cruelty, upon ourselves and other species
"Recreational" fishing is just another one of our barbarisms
I see what you did there (etymologically)
Not etymologically related, just homophones; barb (from French) and barbarian (from Greek) have distinct roots.
Unfortunately, I imagine that procedure would significantly increase the probability of mortality, if not directly kill the fish.
They should have tried to communicate with it, learned its ways, and adopted its people
"I should like to teach you the dance of my people" is from the Kikuyu fairy tale "The Warrior And The Irimũ".
Kayak fished the St. Croix river last year, on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for smallmouth bass. Crystal clear water. Floated over several huge sturgeon, 4-6 feet long. The way they look, it feels like coming across a dinosaur. Thankfully they're bottom feeders.
Acipenser transmontanus are harmless sucker mouth fish, and lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea.
They are usually strictly catch and release, but in a kayak could probably pull you a great distance. They are deceptively strong for their size, and a big part of local conservation efforts.
400 years is plausible, as they do live a long time when left alone. =3
My fishing story - as a young teen, I "caught" a sturgeon on the Ottawa River (just outside of Pembroke) in a 12' aluminum boat. This was in an area where we'd typically expect to catch bass and northern pike - our fishing net was maybe the size of a large diner plate, and reeling the fish in might take a minute or two.
My father was in the boat with me. After hooking the fish, it took about 20 minutes before the fish was close enough that we could see it from the boat, and identified it as a sturgeon - it was the only time I'd ever caught one. This one was so much bigger than anything I'd caught before. I was using one of those jointed Rapala lures, and it had hooked the dorsal fin. I can confirm the sturgeon could definitely pull the two of us, and the boat, upstream - but not a great distance - just enough to move the boat around.
After about 25 minutes, my line snapped (it may have been 12 lbs test). We didn't really have a way of getting it in the boat in any case, and we would have released it anyway. This was probably the late 80s/early 90s - so nothing captured on a phone camera - it just lives on in my Dad's & my memories...
The local tagged 80 year olds were caught so many times over the years they are surprisingly mellow about the inconvenience once landed in the shallows. Still, takes guts to attempt that in a dingy, as "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" (Jaws, 1975). lol =3
> lived in the local rivers long before our towns were even an idea
To be fair, the towns you're talking about are barely 200-300 years or so I presume? Most other towns in the world are probably older than those towns, and maybe even the fish if it's just 400 years ago :)
To be fair the towns a North American might be talking about could easily date to 400 to 600 years ago at least - with signs of human occupation in the Great Lakes area going back 10-12,000 years before present, a good deal on the present lake floors.
Where I live on the West Coast any towns older than a couple hundred years are long gone, the people were killed or evicted from their land long ago. The existing towns are all new.
Towns are where people live, buildings come and go - Manitoulin Island, within the Great Lakes, still has the Wiikwemkoong First Nation unceded and occupied land, near to which French Jesuits set up a mission in 1648.
Probably not: you grossly underestimate the amount of urban growth and development worldwide since the industrial revolution.
Wild to imagine what the PCB concentration must be in a creature like that
They do raise white sturgeon in California land-based fish-farms for food.
Those are not the 14' century old beasts in the river. =3
I know this is always an unpopular opinion but I just think we as a species should eat far fewer animals. Fish species have been really substantially negatively affected all over the planet by human activity, activities such as bottom trawling and line fishing are hugely destructive (the lines can be tens of km long!) and the whole marine ecosystem is under unique threats from climate change. We don't really know what we are killing and eating, and I am sure we will regret it later on scientifically.
I'm a lifelong plant eater and you can survive very happily, healthily, with lower carbon footprints at all stages of life with it. And if anyone says "protein" or DHA I'll talk all about the pentose phosphate pathway whilst munching linseeds.
It's perhaps not intuitive but it turns out organized anglers have been a big part of rescuing various fish populations. For instance, as a member of the "Backcountry Hunters & Anglers" group me and about 20 other members hiked up the West Fork of Oak Creek in Oak Creek Canyon AZ with heavy backpack tanks filled with (formerly) endangered Apache Trout fingerlings. It was absolutely wonderful to watch the little ones swim away. Trout Unlimited has a ton of conservation efforts including habitat, which helps viability of a whole bunch of other species.
Similarly, you can read the book "People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsin's Love Affair with an Ancient Fish" to learn about how the people around Lake Winnebago came together to restore the health of its native Sturgeon population.
This idea of "othering" human beings apart from the animal world might sound like the most effective way to "help" animals but humans, being complicated, don't work that way.
I couldn't care less what you eat, if it makes you happy, awesome. But there's a whole lot more going on culturally with conservation that is entwined with the evolved nature of human beings.
In the sturgeon case, part of their trouble is habitat loss for their breeding grounds. The wiki linked in another comment says that the cause there is agricultural runoff, although it's not specific if that is plant or animal farming. Being vegetarian might not help the fish much if the farming is still causing the destruction of their breeding grounds.
Seems like you think people catch lake sturgeon to eat them. This is a very rare thing these days. Sturgeon fishing is almost always catch and release. This doesn't mean there aren't any fish killed. Any catch and release is quite stressful and might kill one. But people aren't just eating them and sturgeon are quite robust. And there's certainly no commercial fishing for them like the issues with ocean/marine ecosystems you're describing.
At least in Wisconsin rivers/lakes you cannot legally keep any sturgeon with the normal fishing license. You have to pay an extra fee to keep 1 (per season). And according to the statewide Wisconsin statistics only 5 sturgeon were harvested from the St. Croix River in 2025, and a total of 58 were harvested across the entire state.
Years again I was gifted a sturgeon fishing trip on the Fraser and I still feel bad thinking about it. In hindsight knowing how much we stressed and probably harmed that animal. What a cruel way to entertain ourselves.
Many fish can be farmed easily.
If we continued as hunters-gatherers we'd do the same with many other animals, but we instead decided to farm them so the other species can survive.
On the other hand, there are wild boars roaming my country in numbers that should be reduced, but somehow very few people want to eat them and they're causing a problems. Bear meat is a bit more popular, but killing off excess bears is a hot topic every year. Meanwhile horse meat is more easily available over here.
People are going to have to learn to eat algae, prawns, and insect proteins.
As the eutrophication events in a warming ocean will suffocate just about everything else. Have a nice day. =3
Spirulina is yummy. I thought it was blue green algae but apparently it's not, but it is easily confused for one.
I feel somewhat skeptical of the methods as they were superficially described in this article. Will need to read more later. However, I also have been aware of the demise of sturgeon and I really hope we will get to see their populations return.
About thirty years ago, I was canoeing on the Suwannee when a sturgeon full out of the water breached fifty feet behind us.
Nearly scared the bejeezus out of me.
And still feels like something I dreamed.
Beautiful fish. Seen it in person.
Better for the big picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huso_fulvescens Also, note the recent reclassification from Acipenser to Huso.
From the descriptions there, the article's estimate of 99% (reduction from historic population levels) is a severe underestimate.
Why don't these fish die of cancer and old age sooner?
Because they don’t have vape pens and processed foods
seems reductive
It's usually becaise they have lower metabolism so their cells don't suffer as much damage as ours, and they probably have a lot of copies of genes that prevent cancer.
Maybe. But whales don’t get cancer either, and whale metabolism is… impressive (well their resting heart rate is lower than ours but they grow orders of magnitude faster, to a point, and sustain themselves gorging on literal tons of food).
Humans have pretty low selective pressure for cancer resistant genes (a tiny fraction of people get cancer before or during their reproductive years).
I wonder if whales survive to an equivalent of human old age (where we can be pretty fragile and still survive for decades).
> I wonder if whales survive to an equivalent of human old age (where we can be pretty fragile and still survive for decades).
They do and this is well-documented. They're one of the few (only?) other species where we can directly see the role matriarchs (grandmothers, either past their reproductive ages or even undergoing menopause) have on the development of the youth, and it's been used to explore the role of living post-reproductive ancestors might have on natural selection (which was previously not thought to be affected by it).
Maternal grandmothers have even been found to ~spontaneously regain their milk to help nurse infant whales, iirc.
Humans commonly have grandchildren in their 40s (less so recently of course). We get fragile in our 70s. I'm wondering about living decades in that fragile state, where cancer happens to be a lot more common.
That mostly doesn’t count, since humans still regularly have kids of their own in their forties (so the direct link to natural selection would overshadow any lower-pressure grandmotherly effects), so you’d have to push the window out to the post-menopausal period, which coincides with the period in which various cancers begin to be an issue.
I like the theory that whales are so big that their tumors get killed by tumors before they can spread.
Don't mind this, they'll definitely be fished to extinction now.
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> I recently visited Lake America
Wonder wtf you were talking about: apparently the US has expanded on their threats to other's national sovereignty, I guess to the surprise of no one:
> Lake Ontario became the center of a geographical naming dispute when U.S. president Donald Trump issued an executive order directing U.S. federal agencies to refer to it as "Lake America" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario_naming_dispute
It's like a TV show, hilarious from the outside but I'm sure dire internally. Good luck y'all.
Nobody is calling it Lake America but prime idiots and Google. America isn't the US but a little over half of them are too dumb to figure that out.
If you were out of the loop, the South Park show also changed its name to South America, because this is the timeline we live in.
How does renaming a lake infringe on Canada’s sovereignty?
As far as I can tell, it hasn't been renamed, it's certain individuals and departments of the government that started referring to it as such. Things like that usually happens when the government is interested in making "subtle" threats to the nations surrounding the geographical they've "renamed". Lots of cases of this in history, the US didn't come up with this by themselves exactly.