funding for this program is brought to you by the arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of minnesota [Music] did you know that there are fish swimming in the st louis river today whose ancestors were around at the same time as the stegosaurus and the triceratops there's fossil evidence of sturgeons dating back 136 million years at one time sturgeon were abundant here traveling miles and miles up the st louis river but sturgeon numbers tanked for a lot of reasons and now scientists and others are figuring out ways to help them to return so what's going on let's ask tom howes and brian borkholder they've both worked on this for more than 20 years with the fond du lac band's natural resources department hi tom why are these fish important to you and to ojibwe people well professionally they're important as a species that that the band is trying to restore and uh in the st louis river because they were here historically and so my personal life and our in our my professional life are very much the same as a as a band member it's it's hard to unleave those things um the way that i approach what i do is that a fish a wildlife a plant resource any of those things if they've contributed to our well-being over time we sort of have a responsibility back to them to return that interchange of energy i wouldn't be here if it wasn't for sturgeon if it wasn't for blueberries if it wasn't for menominee if it wasn't for those maple trees giving me syrup and so on and so especially that comes into play when species are really struggling and across the great lakes lake sturgeon are a rarity whereas historically there were a lot more of them most of the sturgeon populations were either extirpated or extremely beat down back in the late 1800s early 1900s from development over harvest deforestation and pollution so most of the current viable populations in the great lakes regions have had some help from man and management to be rehabilitated restored brought back up to historical levels along the fond du lac reservation we have been stocking eggs fry in advanced stage fingerlings now for about 20 years and we have seen some evidence of success we now have about 20 adults and sub adults swimming around with radio transmitters that we can track and look at habitat use and hopefully then get some indication of when spawning will occur because our goal is to document successful spawning at that point then we can declare some success in the restoration effort because you know the population is not restored until it starts reproducing on its own why does it take so long for sturgeon to start producing eggs the number of eggs that can be produced by a female or a function of body weight body suffice the larger the female the more eggs they can produce so it's it's a trade-off it's an evolutionary trade-off on you know females will only spawn about every five to seven years once they mature so you know every five to seven years producing half a million eggs versus every five to seven years producing a thousand fifteen hundred eggs two thousand eggs it's it's a choice that they have made and they choose to wait until they're 50 60 inches and 25 to 30 years old can you describe your process of collecting eggs for hatching our goal is to collect eggs from usually five to seven females and we try to get four males per female to increase genetic diversity we can go into these rivers and visually look at fish and count fish and we watch them we observe and we identify females just by looking at the behavior the males will come up along the female the females and start slapping them to induce egg deposition so as soon as we see this going on we know she's a female and we can just reach in there and grab her and take her to shore and take a small portion of her eggs we generally take about a thousand eggs that's what our goal is per female then we can get 250 eggs per male from each female and then we can start physically combining the eggs combining the milk stirring them getting them to fertilize and at that point they are transferred to a streamside rearing facility that just brings water right from the river flushes it through the hatchery and spits the water back out and when the fish start hatching we start bringing them here for stocking how does the team use the transmitters they put on the fish the guys will go out every week and get locations on each individual fish so we're looking at habitat use now and then these transmitters are long life transmitters and we're hoping that the fish that we tagged this year those transmitters will still be working when they mature and we can track them right to the spawning grounds whatever wherever they ultimately choose to try to spawn and then that's where we will set up shop for larp of fish to document success in the whole restoration effort our program or effort that we're doing right now is basically 25 years of stocking 1500 fish and that will give us something we can walk away from and should be a genetically diverse enough self-sustaining spawning population sturgeon have survived millennia and listed a barrage of insults including overfishing pollution and habitat loss the restoration efforts underway are designed to give sturgeon a fighting chance on the st louis river who knows for sure if they'll win it [Music] programming is supported by western lake superior's sanitary district innovating solutions and reducing mercury pollution in the st louis river through research and community programs online at wlssd.com