Fishing planet gar north carolina12/24/2023 ![]() Pretty soon you don’t have any spawners-and then you don’t have any sturgeon.” “So you fish for several years and you basically catch all the sturgeon that come in each year. “People just didn’t realize how destructive that kind of fishing could be,” says Hightower. If you’re after caviar, you need to nab the fish just before they spawn. It was in these ancestral breeding grounds where turn-of-the-century fishermen would cast their nets. ![]() A single female Atlantic sturgeon can carry more than 300 pounds of eggs. When it comes time to spawn, Atlantic sturgeon swim back upstream to mate and lay eggs. Sturgeons are anadromous fish, which means they’re born in freshwater but then spend much of the rest of their lives downstream, either in brackish estuaries or in the sea itself. “It was a short-lived fishery, kind of like clear-cutting a forest,” says Joseph Hightower, an ecologist at North Carolina State University. Then in 1900, the American caviar industry ramped up and gillnetters decimated the Atlantic sturgeon stock in the span of a decade. ![]() But unless you see one jumping-sturgeon can breach like whales-you’d probably never know it was there.įor millions of years, hundreds of thousands of these ancient behemoths swam the rivers and estuaries between northeastern Canada and Florida. It can grow as long as an SUV and weigh up to 800 pounds. ![]() I speak of the Atlantic sturgeon ( Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus), a fish that has been on the earth since the time of the dinosaurs and is quite sizeable in its own right. But now scientists have a new tool to discover where these gentle giants lurk. There are massive, mysterious beasts within America’s rivers-seldom seen and, until recently, rarely studied. ![]()
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