Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotech Center. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations and our other partners, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
the Science Alliance, and Wisconsin Public Television, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you
Kathleen Schmitt Kline. She's an outreach coordinator at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute which
supports research education and outreach dedicated to the stewardship and sustainable use of the nation's Great Lakes
and ocean resources. I had the great pleasure of driving home from the Boundary Waters in Quetico a week and a
half ago along the north shore of Lake Superior, that's a pretty amazing thing that you get to work with.
She has a BA in biology and English from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and a masters in life science communication from
UW-Madison. Tonight she's going to be talking to us about one of the great aspects of living in
Wisconsin, the lake sturgeon, and I think some of the cultural aspects of it. You can see from the title she's
going to be talking to us about "People Of The Sturgeon." Please join me in welcoming Kathleen to Wednesday Nite at
the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Kathleen Kline: Can you hear me okay? That's okay? All right.
Well, thanks so much. I'm really excited to be here at Wednesday Nite at the Lab. This presentation is based on a
book that I coauthored called "People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsin's Love Affair with an Ancient Fish."
It was published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. I coauthored it with Fred
Binkowski, who works at the UW Milwaukee Water Institute, he's also our Sea Grant Aquaculture Extension Specialist, and with
Ron Bruch who is the lead sturgeon biologist with Wisconsin DNR.
And that's it. [LAUGHTER] Books just don't happen. I always like to thank everybody
who made this book possible. UW Sea Grant Institute, who I work for, of course Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,
Great Lakes Water Institute where Fred works, Sturgeon for Tomorrow, which you'll learn a little bit more about them
during this presentation. The UW Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures helped us with a large oral history
project that was done for this book. So we collected a lot of oral histories around the Lake
Winnebago region for this book. The Oshkosh Public Museum which is holding all the artifacts and the interviews that we
collected. And of course the Historical Society Press for working with us to publish it.
I also always like to acknowledge Bob Rashid was the photographer for this book. He passed a way about two years
ago, and this was his last project and he was very, very excited about it. This is a photograph of him up
on the Wolf River. He's got his little aquarium there in the water, and he's trying to take some underwater
photos of sturgeon spawning. So most of the photos in this presentation that aren't the historical photos with Bob's.
And Bob worked with a lot of different University of Wisconsin Madison departments, and we miss him very sorely.
Well, I thought I'd start off this presentation with a big fish. That big blob there is a lake
sturgeon caught in Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin's largest lake. That one is, just to make sure I
get it right, is a 188-pound sturgeon that was speared in 2004 by Dave Piechowski of Red Granite.
And it held the record of the largest sturgeon speared in Lake Winnebago until last year when a 212-pound sturgeon was speared.
So that now holds the record. By the way, that sturgeon had a 42.8-inch girth. So its waistline was a little
bit bigger than mine. Sturgeon are very, very big fish, but today my story isn't just about a big fish story.
This is a story about a very unique fish and very unique cultures that have developed in Wisconsin around this fish.
The lake sturgeon population in Wisconsin's Lake Winnebago system is the largest in the world.
And this didn't happen by chance. It's a result of over 100 years of state management and
research. As well as 35 years of citizen involvement through a group called Sturgeon for Tomorrow,
which I'll talk about a little bit later. It's a true conservation success story, and it's something that
Wisconsin really can be proud of, and it's also something many people hope to replicate around the Great Lakes region.
And I should too, there are many cultures, I can't cover all of them in this presentation. Since I'm here at Wednesday Nite
at the Lab I wanted to focus a little bit more on the research side of it. There's a whole unique research
culture that's developed around sturgeon. Sturgeon researchers are quite passionate about this fish, as
you'll see later on. This is a baby sturgeon. This is a six-month-old lake sturgeon that my coauthor Fred
Binkowski raised in his lab and Milwaukee. They're very, very special ancient fish.
They've existed for over 150 million years. So they were swimming around when the dinosaurs were still
roaming around on Earth. And Fred always likes to say that whatever killed off the dinosaurs didn't kill off the
lake sturgeon so they're pretty special. There are 27 species of sturgeon around the world, and only three
in North America live in fresh water, and that's the lake sturgeon, the pallid sturgeon, and the shovelnose sturgeon.
Lake sturgeon actually predate the formation of the Great Lakes. They were swimming around in the
Mississippi River system before the Great Lakes formed, and when they did they kind of moved in there.
Because they are a very ancient fish, there are some special characteristics of them. They have a skeleton of
cartilage instead of bones. And they also have, instead of a spinal system, they have a notochord much like a lamprey or
a hagfish. And they're a very old fish. And they also don't have scales. They have these rows of bony
cartilage on them, I don't know if you can see them, you can see them kind of better on the younger fish, called scoots.
So they're kind of like a spiky torpedo. Yes? >> Can you turn the front lights
down so we can see better? >> Can you turn? No. [LAUGHTER]
I was wondering if it was as dark for you as it is for me. So, sorry about that.
They're the largest native fish living in the Great Lakes. They're bottom feeders so they don't have any teeth.
They just kind of cruise around on the bottom of the lake or the river and they suck up food with this tube-like appendage that's
kind of like a vacuum cleaner that comes out and they just suck up the food and then it goes back into their body.
They can live to be more than 100 years old. They can weigh more than 200 pounds, as we've seen, and they
can measure as long as seven feet long. Some people think that they might get to be actually bigger
in the Great Lakes, but we'll talk more about that later. All right. These are just some other
pictures of some adult sturgeon. They kind of soften as they age. So that little sturgeon was very spiky.
Larger lake sturgeon they kind of, their scoots kind of smooth out. They don't really need the
protection once they're adults. There's nothing else bigger than them except for us. So those kind of smooth out, and
then they also, if you can see up in the top right-hand corner, they have, like catfish, they have barbels that they can use,
little whiskers that they can use to feel around for food on the bottom of the lake. Sorry.
Well, sturgeon used to thrive all over the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes and the Hudson Bay, but then they
ran into some problems in the 1800s. And there were three major problems for them: dams,
pollution, and overfishing. You can see what some of the problems were with dams. You can see actually, too, the
sturgeon appendage that comes out to feed that's sticking out there. But dams prevented sturgeons
from migrating up to their spawning spots much like salmon. So that would physically prevent them from getting to where they
needed to go. And then standing on a dam was a pretty easy place to spear a sturgeon.
So that's what happened very frequently. This photo was taken probably in the 1890s by HH Bennett who is a
very well known photographer from the Wisconsin Dells area. And this is on the Wisconsin River.
And this is, I really like this picture because I really like the word log jam, but this is what a log jam actually looks
like. It's really a log jam. This is a famous one that happened on the St. Croix River
in 1886. It was five miles long, and it took several weeks to break up. Logging was Wisconsin's first
major industry, and it depended heavily on Wisconsin River for that cheap transportation of the lumber.
But with so many rivers clogged up with logs and then, of course, the saw dust coming from the mills and everything, that
had another affect on sturgeon that polluted the rivers. Even if they did manage to make it up to a river to lay their
eggs, the saw dust and logs would prevent those eggs from actually hatching. And then the final thing,
overfishing. All sturgeon can produce caviar. Caviar is basically sturgeon eggs with a little bit of salt
in it. When caviar got to be very popular in Europe in the late 1800s, a lot of the rivers there
started to get fished out from sturgeon. So people started looking to the US for new supply of sturgeon.
First they went out to the east coast, and they basically almost fished out all the Atlantic sturgeon.
And then they heard about large populations of lake sturgeon in the Great Lakes region. And there was a very large
caviar industry in the Great Lakes region for probably about 10 to 15 years, and then what happened, well, all the sturgeon
were gone. So the largest, there was probably a caviar plant in Green Bay, but the largest one was in
Ohio in Sandusky. So these things were happening all over the Great Lakes region, the pollution, the dams, and the
overfishing. But here in Wisconsin we have Lake Winnebago which is technically part of the Great
Lakes watershed but it's also kind of out on its own, and because of a few unique things about Lake Winnebago, that's why
we have such a healthy lake sturgeon population in it. And one of the things is the Wolf River, which is the main
river feeding into Lake Winnebago, was really terrific for running logs. And it was so terrific that
people just wanted to run logs all the way down to Oshkosh, and they didn't want to build mills along the river.
So the Wolf River actually stayed pretty free flowing, which was terrific for sturgeon. They could make it up there and
spawn. And the other thing is that the lower Fox River, which goes from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay and
actually looks like it's running north and it actually does empty into Green Bay, that's always something we need to point out,
that drops about 170 feet from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay. So that's about the size of Niagara Falls.
And that kind of made Lake Winnebago still connected to Lake Michigan but kind of on its own, too.
So all of the heavy commercial fishing that happened in the Great Lakes didn't really affect the Lake Winnebago population.
And I should say there is some intermixing between those two populations. They continuously find Winnebago
sturgeon down in Green Bay. And there are some sturgeon that have made it up into Lake Winnebago as well, which is a
pretty terrific feat. And this is just a historical map. I think from, yeah, 1867.
This was when, and it shows the elevation drop there from Lake Winnebago and then down to Green Bay, and this was when the
federal government was thinking about creating a system of locks, which they did, to ultimately connect the Great
Lakes to the Mississippi River, and it was kind of not very successful. But anyway, it produced a
beautiful map. So in the late 1800s all sorts of wildlife began to dwindle, and I think the frontier was
kind of closing up and people were kind of taking as much resources as they could, and this really had an affect on the
fish populations in the state. And again, this is hard to read, but this is actually a train that was used in the 1800s,
probably into the 1900s as well, to transport fish fry all over the state. It was called the Badger.
And in 1874 Wisconsin developed a fisheries commission. It was kind of its first step toward developing a conservation
department. They developed this fishery commission, and the main thing that they were doing was raising
fish and then cruising around the state and depositing them in all of these lakes and rivers. And they figured if the fish
were starting to run out, they were going to just raise more and keep planting them in the waterways.
And actually the Badger traveled to Chicago's World Fair in 1893 carrying some Wisconsin sturgeon for the exhibit.
But as the commission started serving the waters in Wisconsin more they started to figure out we don't think that artificial
propagation is going to be the answer. So they started to try and work with the legislature to enact
some laws that would protect some of the fish. One of the most basic things would be to say that, no, you
can't spear sturgeon during spawning season. That's just not good for the population.
So they tried to, I think the first thing they tried to do was simply to bring all of the laws together that already existed on
the books and present them to the legislature and say, hey, can you just sign off on this. And that stirred up so many
local politics and problems that it never passed. So the fish laws in Wisconsin were very, very, they were just
very troublesome. So the fish commission really had a hard time trying to get anything through the
legislature.
But slowly they started to develop some laws, and one of the first things to go was being able to spear sturgeon or many
other fish during the spawning season. But they encountered a lot of resistance, mostly in a few
areas of Wisconsin. Around Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, around Green Bay, and then around Lake Winnebago.
And these were all areas that had been settled early on by Europeans, and I personally think that a lot of people
living in those areas just, they had been living there so long that they really started to see these resources as belonging to
them and they were a big part of their life. So they encountered a lot of resistance, and as I went
through all of the laws and did my research for the book, the Lake Winnebago region was a very active political region and knew
to contact their legislators and made a big ruckus. So they were able to thwart some laws that were going through or
get the laws to reflect more of what they wanted to happen in their region. So I found that really
interesting that they really wanted to fight for their resources. Oh, by the way, I should mention
about this photo, these are two commercial fishermen with a fine catch of sturgeon in 1913 on Lake Winnebago.
I think the one on the right, okay, 187.5 pounds, that sturgeon on the right there.
So some people were fighting to kind of hold on to the old ways of using as many resources as they wanted to.
There were other people in Wisconsin who were starting to kind of step back and say, hey, we need to look at this, we need
to look at this from more of a conservation view. This is a photo of the cutover region in northern Wisconsin.
So offer all of the timber in northern Wisconsin was cut down there was just barren land with stumps all over the place.
Then they encouraged farmers to come up and farm this land. So after things like this had happened in Wisconsin, and
actually the year after the last passenger pigeon was ever seen in the country people in Wisconsin started saying we need
to start enacting some better legislation to protect our resources. So in 1913, sorry, in 1915 there
was a major overhaul of the fisheries commission in Wisconsin, and basically they decided that they needed a
conservation department, they needed to look at more than just fish. And in 1915 this happened and
they also decided to ban all harvest of lake sturgeon in the state.
I'm going to shift into the research aspect of this a little bit more. This is a photograph of the
Trout Lake Research Station in northern Wisconsin, part of the UW Limnology Department here on campus.
It has a very, very long history and some of you might know that Edward Birge, who kind of founded this department, also
founded the study of limnology. And that's Edward Birge, if you can see, sitting second from the right with the hat on.
And what started to happen after 1915 was that rather than trying to pass different legislation based on who had the most
political power in a certain region and who wanted to have strict fish laws and who wanted to have more lenient fish laws,
the state started to look toward the university for research assistance to try and start making some decisions on how to
manage these resources based on science rather than on the political things. So Edward Birge was very
involved with the fisheries commission. He was on the commission for a while.
He was also very involved at the university. He was one of the university presidents for some time.
And the man sitting to his left is Edward Schneberger and one of his graduate students. And Edward Schneberger ended up
being the first person to do a research study on the Winnebago population of sturgeon. So he kind of founded the study
of this population in 1941. So this population in Lake Winnebago has been studied continuously since then.
But even though, and I wish you could see this one a little bit better, it's my favorite photo, but even though there were some
positive things happening with the university and with some research studies starting, there was still a lot of poaching
going on with the sturgeon population. So it was still illegal to touch the sturgeon population, but
many people, especially up on the Wolf River, were still harvesting the fish. And it was also during
prohibition time, so sometimes illegal poaching got mixed in with a little moon shine, which these guys are celebrating right
here. But there was quite a bit of poaching activity going on up-river.
These are some photographs of some early wardens in the 1940s. They're taking sturgeon off of set lines.
And that was one of the most popular ways for people to illegally harvest sturgeon on the Wolf River.
They would simply just stretch a line across the river, and then tie a bunch of lines to it with a bunch of hooks.
And basically it depended on the sturgeon running up-river during spawning season. They would just run into the
hooks. And many, many, many sturgeon were taken this way. They're holding two sturgeon
there, two wardens, that they took off of these set lines, and, again, it's hard to see but there are just hundreds of lines
hanging down with all of these hooks. So it was a big problem, and there weren't as many wardens at
that time either so they really had their work cut out for them. And I should just say, throughout this book, because we
did do these oral histories, we do have a lot of stories from people in the region talking about these different aspects of
the cultures around sturgeon. And this is Ken Corbett on the left. He was an early warden, a flying
warden, that's why he's in front of the plane, and Haze Diemel, who lived up on the, still lives up on the Wolf River.
And his family did a bit of poaching. So there's a story in the book about Ken Corbett flying in his
warden plane looking down on the Wolf River for some illegal activity, and Haze Diemel and his buddies knew that he was up
there and they played all these tricks on him and hid boats on him and made decoys. But they're standing next to
each other now so the time has passed. Well, right around the time of the Great Depression is when
people around the Lake Winnebago region really wanted to regain access to this resource. During the Great Depression a
lot of people were having a hard time, and a lot of people around the Lake Winnebago really missed eating this fish.
You can imagine harvesting a 200-pound fish how long that might feed your family for. Plus, it was just a big part of
their culture. They had learned this from their grandparents who ultimately had learned it from the Native
Americans living in that region when Europeans first moved in. So in the 1930s, again there was a lot of legislative pressure.
People around the Lake Winnebago region were heading to Madison to do a lot of lobbying, and ultimately they were able to
pass a winter spearing, only for Lake Winnebago. So this is the only place in Wisconsin where this sport is
allowed. So that was in 1931 and there's been the sturgeon spearing season on Lake Winnebago ever
since. And that's a photo from 1935, David and Rose --. And I should say their daughter
submitted this photo, their twins, and they wrote this really nice letter saying that their parents were both deaf and
this was the first time that her father had gone sturgeon spearing and he got a sturgeon on the first time and he was so
excited and their daughters wrote "Can you imagine all the hands flying around telling this great story."
I just thought that was so cute. Well, just for a little background on what the spearing
is all about, it does go back to the Native Americans living around Lake Winnebago, also living all around the Great
Lakes region and in other parts of the country as well. But basically it hasn't changed a whole lot since Native
Americans were the only ones doing it. You need to have a very dark area.
You cut a hole in the ice and you need to be able to see down into the water so you want the only light that's coming to be
coming out of the water. So you need to put a blanket over your head. That's what Native Americans
usually did. And they also usually just laid down on the ice on their stomachs, took a spear, dangled
the little decoy in the ice to get the sturgeon's attention, and then just waited. Well, this is how it's developed
into modern day. I think a lot of people around Lake Winnebago eventually decided that they didn't want to
be lying down on the ice with a blanket over their head so they started creating the ice shanty. So that's kind of the dawn of
the modern spearing age was the creation of the ice shanty. This is actually almost I think a 30-year-old ice shanty that I
think was still out on the ice last year. It's a pretty common one to see out there.
But they're all different shapes and sizes. And basically the most important thing about them is that they
don't have any windows. They're also called dark houses. This woman, this was the very first sturgeon that she speared.
She's ecstatic. She was very, very excited. A lot of people ask me, why do they have to spear the fish?
That just seems, why can't they just take them on hook and line? And I just always say that it goes back to the tradition
that's been passed on through generations, families living around this region. And this is how they've been
taken since it was only the Native Americans taking them. And honestly I've sat in an ice shanty with people before, and
I've sat there six hours looking down at this whole. And this is just a scene of driving out on to the lake on
Lake Winnebago when it's frozen. This is what it looks like inside the shanty. It's basically pitch dark except
for this eerie grow that comes from the hole. And all you're doing is just sitting there and looking into
this hole. And sometimes you don't see anything. Sometimes you don't see any sort
of life. And there are some people who sit there for 15 years and they never get a sturgeon.
So I actually think it's kind of maybe the most sporting way to take a sturgeon because you have to be pretty darn patient to sit
there. You take your eyes away from that hole for one second, the fish could go by and then you
might not see one for another decade. Plus, after you spear it you have to get the 200-pound fish
out of the hole and then wrestle it out of the shanty and then get it on to your truck. So you really have to work for
it. This is just a picture of a spear. They're all made locally.
You can't go to Cabela's somewhere and buy a sturgeon spear. They're mostly handmade around
Lake Winnebago. They run around $200. And just to kind of segue back into the research, this is the
fellow who had that Green Bay Packer shanty out on the ice. This is Bill Casper. So in the 1970s, so there was
still poaching going on. The sturgeon population was doing okay. The DNR had continued to do
studies on the population. In the 1970s, because there was a lot of agricultural activity going on around Lake Winnebago,
a lot of that run-off was starting to cloud up the lake. It's a very shallow lake. It's only about 20 feet deep in
its deepest part. Well, all the sturgeon spearers were out there and they couldn't see any sturgeon because the
water was very cloudy. But Bill Casper was convinced that the sturgeon spearing had gotten so bad that something had
to be done and that the DNR wasn't telling the whole story. That they were probably more worried about the population
than they were letting on. And so he started to organize people around the lake. And he came up with this.
This is the original pamphlet that he came up with in 1977, and he posted it all around the lake asking people, sturgeon
spearers, to get together and discuss what was going on with the sturgeon population. I have to say, too, that Bill
did tell me that he went around the lake and the best place to post these were at the taverns. And, of course, you get to the
tavern and you see all of these people you know, and then you have sit down and have a drink and then by the time he got
around the lake he was really tired. [LAUGHTER] Bill Casper's idea and other
sturgeon spearers who got together with him to form this group called Sturgeon for Tomorrow.
Their idea was that somebody had to figure out how to artificially raise sturgeon. Nobody knew how to do it.
People had been trying. Michigan tried in the early 1900s. Somebody in Pennsylvania tried
in 1890. They had all failed. They weren't able to hatch the eggs or if they did hatch the
eggs, the small little sturgeon just died right away. They couldn't figure out what they wanted to eat.
So Bill Casper and the Sturgeon for Tomorrow founders approached the DNR and said we really need to figure out how to raise
sturgeon artificially. And he actually wanted to start stocking them in Lake Winnebago. Well, the DNR was very leery
about that. They didn't want to start stocking a population that they thought was actually doing just
fine. They tried to let people know that probably the reason why they weren't spearing as many
sturgeon was because they couldn't see them because of the water clarity in Lake Winnebago. But the more that they talked
back and forth with Sturgeon for Tomorrow they decided that maybe it would be a good idea to figure out how to raise these
fish in a hatchery. A, if anything ever did happen to the population, they would be able to kind of start from
scratch and repopulate the lake. B, they could really learn a lot about the fish during this process, and not much was known
about sturgeon in the 1970s at this point. They were still a very curious fish that people didn't really
understand their life history, how they developed or what they liked to eat at different times or where they moved at different
times of the year. So Bill Casper actually, this was citizen science, I think, at its best.
The DNR didn't really know where to go for help with this because all the other experiments had failed.
So Bill Casper was reading National Geographic that told the story about Bill Ballard, a researcher from Dartmouth, who
had gone to the Soviet Union to do studies on sturgeon. And so Bill Casper was on the phone to Dartmouth, and he was
calling Bill Ballard. And Ballard was probably almost in his 80s at that point. He had retired and he was doing
the research that he wanted to do and having a great old time. And Bill Ballard, when he got on the phone with Casper said, my
God, man, you have sturgeon in Wisconsin? You mean I've been going to the Soviet Union and I could have
just been going to Wisconsin? Which I just thought was so funny because we've come a long way with our communication
technologies. So Bill Ballard was more than happy to come to Wisconsin and talk to these sturgeon spearers
and the DNR. So Sturgeon for Tomorrow did a little fundraiser and they raised the funds to fly him out
here with his wife. They stayed at the Holiday Inn in Oshkosh, and they had this big talk with the DNR.
And that night Bill Ballard went home to his room in the Holiday Inn and wrote down the research protocol to do the first
artificial propagation try on lake sturgeon. He handed it over to Bill Casper and then he flew back
to New Hampshire. So these two guys were the lucky guys that got to go out on the Wolf River in the middle of the
night and try and capture two very large lake sturgeon who were in the middle of spawning to get their eggs and their
milt. This is Dan Folz and Mike Primising. They actually still help out
with the annual sturgeon tagging. They're very addicted to this fish, and they're very wonderful
people. So they headed out in the middle of the night to get these fish and they struggled.
They found a female right away but then all the males took off, which is what they do. So they had to keep the female
alive for several hours, actually, while they tried to find a male. And they just kept pouring water
over her and just tried to keep her irrigated. And finally they did sort things out, got the male, and Dan went
to go take the sturgeon, the female sturgeon back into the water and she was exhausted, but he said he kind of moved her
back and forth in the water for about 20 minutes and then suddenly she just gave this little flap and then she just
swam away. And when I was talking to Dan he said something like I've worked with so many fish in my career
at the DNR but really the lake sturgeon is the only fish you can really have a relationship with.
So this is a picture of lake sturgeon spawning in the Wolf River. The first try with the
artificial propagation was unsuccessful. They're very disappointed but the second try they tried a
different location, this time at the Wild Rose fish hatchery, one of the state fish hatcheries. And Ballard came back for that
try, and he slept in the lab on a cot and waited for those sturgeon eggs to hatch and they did.
And they survived. And at the same time, my coauthor, Fred Binkowski, he had been sent some eggs as well to
give it a shot in Milwaukee and he was successful as well. So the first successful sturgeon propagation of lake sturgeon
happened here in Wisconsin. I'm probably running a little, are we going till quarter to? Just keep going?
All right. Well, I thought I'd just tell some more of the stories related to research.
This is three generations of the Gaiser family. I should just double check. Sorry...
Dave, Bill, and Mike. Bill there in the middle had a terrific story of eating sturgeon head soup.
That was his favorite way to eat sturgeon. And that's what his family would do whenever they got a sturgeon.
They would make this special sturgeon head soup. And it was funny because we had this story that he told about it
and his son and his grandson were just like oh, my God, I would never touch that. But he just really thought of it
like that was the best thing ever. And Ed Schneberger, the first sturgeon biologist who did the
first studies on the sturgeon population, the first thing, the spearing season ended up to be a great way to gather data on
sturgeon because all the DNR had to do was say you have to register your fish. So people would come in with
their fish and the DNR could weigh the fish and they could try and tell what sex it was, how old it was, and they really
wanted to get a hold of this bone in the ear called the otolith to try and age the sturgeon.
I've got a picture of that a little bit later on. But Schneberger found he had a really hard time in the 1940s
when he was doing this getting people to give up their sturgeon heads because a lot of them liked to make this soup.
So he kind of had to find alternate ways to do that study. But it nice to find an actual interview of somebody talking
about this special sturgeon head soup. Which was interesting, too, because talking to some of the
members of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin, there were stories about a sturgeon head soup coming from them, too.
So that's probably where the recipe came from and has been passed down. Well, these were some of the
early studies being done out on the ice. I think this is from the 1950s. And a lot of the early studies
were just gathering very basic information about the fish. How long are they and even trying to figure out what part
of their reproductive cycle they were in. And today when people are registering their sturgeon there
is a lot of science done on these fish when they bring them in. So they're all waiting there
with their frozen sturgeon to check in with the DNR. This is a photograph of some of the DNR employees slitting open
a speared sturgeon to try and determine at what reproductive stage that they're at. And all of that information is
used to determine, it's a very, very tightly regulated sport. So every year the DNR takes a look at the population data that
they have, and they set up these quotas for different types of fish. So a male fish, a female fish,
at what different types of their life stage they're at as well. And once one of those quotas is met the whole season shuts down.
The DNR also does quite a bit of research during the spring spawning season, too. This is right below the Shawano
Dam in Shawano. That's why it looks so dramatic. But they net as many sturgeon as they possibly can during the
spring spawning season and they release them all. But they bring them out of the water, they measure them, and
they also scan them to see if they have any identification, if they've netted them before at some point over the last
60 or so years. Early on when the DNR started identifying the fish, they would just put these metal, it's kind
of hard to see, but basically a metal clip on the pectoral fin. And it's funny, sometimes when they're bringing in these fish
or when somebody brings in a speared fish there are still fish out there with those tags. Some of them have fallen off and
they switched to a different method, but it's kind of neat to see. Those fish have been around a
long time. So this is the modern way that they do it now. They use something called a PIT
tag. It's basically the same thing that people put in to, veterinarians put into your pet,
your dog or your cat, in case they get lost and they can be scanned. So they insert a PIT tag into
the live sturgeon. And then they release them later on. Basically then whenever a
sturgeon is caught again in the spring by the DNR or brought in if it's been speared, they will scan that fish to see if they've
seen it somewhere else. So now the DNR has a huge database about this sturgeon population.
There's nothing else like it in the world. So a lot of science, a lot of things that have been found out
about the population here in Wisconsin are now being transferred throughout the world really.
So this is during the spring spawning season. Again, hard to see, but Fish and Wildlife Service came from
Georgia to collect eggs and milt from Winnebago sturgeon to take back to the Tennessee River where their lake sturgeon
population died out. So they're collecting the eggs here and then they would drive back that night to take the eggs
back to the lab. That's Fred Binkowski, my coauthor, on the left. He'll drive up to the Wolf
River, too, during spawning season and take some eggs. So he's right there, I think mixing up, what, two, four, six,
seven different batches of sturgeon. And he takes them back to his lab in Milwaukee as well and
raises them for different studies that they do in the Winnebago system. That's Fred and Ron, my two
coauthors. They're inserting PIT tags into these very young sturgeon. And then they'll release them
into the system and track them to see where do they go when they're six months old, where do they go when they're two years
old, where are they going during different times of the season. Fred's also been doing some research on tracking adult
sturgeon. So he does perform surgery on them and inserts radio transponders and then lets them
go. And then he takes to the air and he tracks them. But he doesn't always do it in a
World War II biplane. [LAUGHTER] But Fred's a real character and he really wanted this photo in
the book and he made it happen. So there he is. What he does in a normal DNR plane is he'll take headphones
and listen for these fish with the radio transponders and then has a GPS unit so he can track where they are.
So he does this year-round. He'll be up there, yes, all sorts of times of the year. And this is just another photo
of Fred. He has a very personal relationship with this fish. I think I'll skip over these
two. And I'm just going to go to a lot of the things that have been found out here in Wisconsin
about lake sturgeon is now spreading throughout the Great Lakes region. There's a lot of Great Lakes
restoration going on for lake sturgeon which is really exciting. So this is a sturgeon that was
actually caught in the Detroit River, of all places. They weren't expecting to find any sturgeon there.
The Detroit River has had some problems. But they did have they actually found them spawning.
So they've been using things learned on the Wolf River about what sort of spawning habitats sturgeon like to recreate areas
in the Detroit River so that those sturgeon can find more places to spawn. And another thing that's being
transferred throughout the Great Lakes region is the idea of Sturgeon for Tomorrow. People, usually spearers, who
get together and do a lot of fundraising for sturgeon and support a lot of sturgeon research so that the fish will
be there for their grandchildren to be able to enjoy as well. So Sturgeon for Tomorrow chapter, there are five around
the Lake Winnebago region, about 3,000 members. And they've raised quite a bit of money for sturgeon research.
Another chapter just opened up in Michigan now. So that idea is spreading as well.
And I'll just finish with, that's actually my grandfather on the left there holding up a lake sturgeon from the
Mississippi River. He was a commercial fisherman on the Mississippi River so that's my sturgeon connection.
So thanks a lot. I appreciate the opportunity. [APPLAUSE]