cc  >> Okay.  Today we have an exceptional  pleasure.  We are welcoming Kathleen  Schmitt Kline.  She's written a book called  "People of the Sturgeon."  She is co-authoring with Ronald  Bruch and Frederick Binkowski.  I'm not good with names.  It's a beautiful book.  Kathleen is the science writer  at the University of Wisconsin  Sea Grant Institute.  If you're not familiar with it,  it supports research in  education and outreach dedicated  to the stewardship and  sustainable use of the nation's  Great Lakes and ocean resources.  Following the presentation we  will have copies of her book  available, and she'd be happy to  answer questions and sign them  following the program.  I'd like to ask you to join me  in welcoming Ms. Kline to the  program. 

 Thank you.  (applause)  >> Kathleen Kline: I'm just  going to get  this microphone going.  Does that sound okay?  Terrific.  Well, thanks for coming today  and thanks for coming to hear  about a special fish.  Some people have asked me, I've  been working on this project for  about four years and a lot of my  friends, my family will say why  are you writing a book about  this fish?  Why aren't you writing about  blue gills or perch or why this  particular fish?  Well, sturgeon are a very  special fish, and I hope by the  end of this presentation you'll  see why.  Just a few thanks too, this  project started as kind of an  oral history project in the Lake  Winnebago region.  The spearing culture in the Lake  Winnebago region has been going  on for quite a long time.  We worked with several different  agencies to collect people's  family histories, artifacts,  things of that nature, and then  eventually a lot of this  information made its way into  the book.  So just to thank a lot of these  organizations for helping us  out.  And one other thing to mention,  the photographer who worked on  this book who really made this  story come to life, there are  probably over 150 of his  beautiful color photographs in  this book, was Bob Rashid, a  freelance photographer from  Madison here. 

 He passed away unexpectedly last  year, last October.  And so it was just when we were  starting to put the book  together.  Bob did select the cover photo  so he saw the cover photo  design, but he never saw the  book come to fruition.  I just want to remember him.  This is a photo that my husband  took of Bob who's photographing  up on the Wolf River.  He has his camera in that  aquarium there and he's trying  to get some good shots of  sturgeon spawning in the water  for the book project.  So just to remember Bob.  And most of the photos in this  presentation are Bob's photos.  Well, here is a six-month-old  baby sturgeon.  A lot of people when they see  the giant adult sturgeon some  people think they're quite ugly. 

 I think when you look at the  six-month-old sturgeon you can  say that they're quite cute.  That's me holding it actually; I  really wanted to hold a baby  sturgeon.  They're a very unique fish for  biological reasons, but they're  also unique because many  cultures in Wisconsin have  developed around this single  species of fish which I just  find very interesting, and  that's really what the book is  about is about people's  relationship to this fish.  So just a few facts about the  sturgeon just in case you're not  that familiar with him.  This is Ron Bruch right here who  is one of my co-authors.  They've been around for over 150  million years, and they've  stayed relatively the same  through that time so people do  say that they're a prehistoric  fish or an ancient fish.  They can live to be over 100  years old.  They can grow to be nearly eight  feet long, perhaps longer,  people aren't really sure.  They can be over 200 pounds.  There are several different  species of sturgeon around the  world. 

 Lake sturgeon live in the Great  Lakes region, the Mississippi  River basin and the Hudson Bay.  But they've almost been, pretty  much all of the species of  sturgeon are either threatened  or endangered in some range of  their natural habitat, but not  in Lake Winnebago.  Lake Winnebago has the largest  lake sturgeon population in the  world.  It's a very healthy population,  and I'll get into some reasons  why that is.  But it's interesting that it's  such a large fish and it really  makes a statement when you see  it because it's such a big fish,  but it's something very, very  small that almost did them in  basically and that's their roe,  their eggs which makes caviar.  Caviar is basically salted  sturgeon eggs.  And there are sturgeon species  around the world that are much  more popular for their caviar  like the beluga sturgeon.  There's white sturgeon on the  west coast that they're farming  now for their caviar.  But basically is when people  figured out that this was a  delicacy that people would pay  for, also their meat is quite  tasty, that's when things kind  of started turning bad for  sturgeon.  That's when the over harvest  began. 

 So it happened in Europe and it  also happened here in the Great  Lakes region in the late 1800s,  people started to make some  caviar industries.  So basically it's this  relationship to people and  sturgeon with the caviar that  brought a lot of problems for  sturgeon.  I just wanted to give you a  quick geographic lesson here  just so you know the region that  I'm talking about.  Lake Winnebago is just south of  Green Bay.  It is part of the Great Lakes  watershed.  Lake Winnebago empties into the  lower Fox River which then  empties into Green Bay.  So it is part of the Great Lakes  region, but this population of  sturgeon living in Lake  Winnebago and the rivers  emptying into Lake Winnebago  have always been a unique  population.  They are related to the other  Great Lake sturgeon but they've  always been kind of a contained  population as well.  And one of the reasons for that,  this is an 1867 map from the US  Corps of Engineers.  There's Lake Winnebago there and  it's actually showing the  elevation change from Lake  Winnebago to Green Bay. 

 That's a drop of about 170 feet.  That's about what Niagara Falls  is.  That's what's separating most of  the Great Lakes sturgeon from  the Lake Winnebago population.  There's this natural separation  between them.  But every now and then sturgeon  are going down all of those  rapids and making it to Lake  Michigan.  So there is some intermixing,  too, going on.  Well, once people did start  figuring out that sturgeon were  pretty tasty to eat and they  could make caviar from their  eggs that's when all the  problems began.  This is a photo from probably  sometime before 1908.  It's an HH Bennett photo,  actually on the Wisconsin River.  But this is a couple men  standing on top of a dam during  sturgeon spawning season and  just spearing sturgeon which is  pretty darn easy to get a  sturgeon that way. 

 It's kind of like just picking  an apple from a tree.  So this is, basically when the  over harvest began, that's when  sturgeon management began in the  state as well.  So as early as 1903 the state  started instituting special  regulations just for sturgeon to  protect sturgeon.  And one of the earliest  regulations was closing, in 1903  they had a spring close season.  So when the sturgeon were  running up rivers in the spring  it was illegal then to do this  very thing right here.  There's just a long, long  history of sturgeon over harvest  in Wisconsin and throughout the  Great Lakes.  Some of it happened before it  was illegal and some of it  happened while it was illegal.  There was a lot of illegal  poaching going on for sturgeon.  These are two gentlemen who are  commercial fisherman, I believe.  This was 1913 so it was still  legal to get sturgeon at some  point during the year, but  they've got a fine harvest right  there. 

 That largest one there was just  about 188-pounds and 79 inches.  So that's just about, I think,  the same size, nearly the same  size as the largest record for  spearing on Lake Winnebago.  It's a big fish.  This actually was taken in 1915  which, during that year, all  sturgeon harvest was made  illegal in Wisconsin.  And that's because the state  management, the conservation  commission it was just becoming  very evident that the sturgeon  population was declining very  rapidly.  So they just thought if they  shut everything down for maybe  20 years that the population  could come back on its own.  That was a photo that was  submitted by family in the  region.  And this, sturgeon poaching also  got wrapped up in bootlegging  along with other illegal  activities that were going on.  It was a big business.  So here's some sturgeon  fishermen, and we don't have a  date on this one but we're  guessing it was probably around  prohibition time. 

 They've got their hooch going  and a fine catch there of  sturgeon and some other fish.  There was a lot of illegal  activity going on with sturgeon.  And it continued into the '40s,  '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s really.  There's a lot of history of this  illegal activity.  These are some early wardens in  the 1940s.  This is a snag line.  One of the most common ways to  poach sturgeon in the spring, if  you wanted to get a whole bunch  of them, was to run a line  across the river when they're  running up river, and I'll show  you what the hooks like,  basically just a whole bunch of  lines with hooks, and basically  the sturgeon would just run into  them as they're running both up  river and then coming back down  river after spawning.  So these are some wardens who  are removing sturgeon that got  caught up on these illegal snag  lines.  And that's a snag line that was  pulled out and some sturgeon  that was taken off by the  wardens, and you can see how  many hooks are on those snag  lines.  Just hundreds of hundreds of  fish would be taken this way,  and it was a really huge  problem. 

 This is what some of the hooks  look like.  Very sharp, they're weighted  down with lead, and basically  just hung down and the sturgeon  would just run into them.  So as I said, it went into  almost basically a lot of  poaching was going on until just  maybe 20 years ago.  This is a retired warden here on  the left, Ken Corbett, and Hayes  -- who lived up on the Wolf  River.  Throughout the book we have  stories that were pulled from  some of these oral history  interviews.  And the story that I pulled out  from these two interviews from  these men, so Ken Corbett there  is a warden, he was a flying  warden, one of the earliest  flying wardens for the DNR, and  he's telling stories of flying  up and down the Wolf River and  seeing the poachers down there  and radioing down to the other  DNR people on the ground trying  to head off these poachers.  And Hayes -- was one of the  poachers.  So Hayes -- has his own stories  about trying to outwit the DNR  wardens, setting up boat decoys  for them.  I guess they had maybe about 10  boats that all looked the same  and they'd station them around  the river to try and confuse the  flying warden which was Ken  Corbett.  So they had some fun too. 

 So basically in 1932 during the  Depression and this actually  came out of the Depression.  People around the Lake Winnebago  region said times are hard, we'd  really like to have access to  sturgeon again.  We'd like to go out and be able  to legally take sturgeon and eat  them, let our family enjoy a  meal of sturgeon again.  The Lake Winnebago region was a  very powerful political region.  They were very good at  convincing their legislators to  go in and advocate for what they  wanted, especially for their  natural resources.  So they put a lot of pressure on  Governor Phil La Follette and  passed a bill to allow a  sturgeon spearing season every  winter just on Lake Winnebago.  And the spearing season has been  going every year since then, so  since 1932.  And it's a big, big deal.  I don't know if any of you have  ever been up but over 10,000  people head out onto Lake  Winnebago to go sturgeon  spearing.  It's a very unique sport. 

 There's another sturgeon  spearing season in Michigan, but  they only allow five sturgeon to  be taken every year, and so  after five sturgeon are taken  it's over.  This is usually a couple  thousand or around a thousand I  think.  It changes every year.  But it's a very healthy  population so it can support  this spearing season.  This is Mary Becher I think is  how you pronounce her name.  This is the first sturgeon that  she had ever speared.  So Bob Rashid, our photographer,  captured that excitement on her  face.  The spearing season, a lot of  people have asked me, why do  people spear the sturgeon?  It seems really just kind of  maybe too much.  Why don't they just go angling  for them.  Well, the spearing tradition  goes back long before Europeans  were living in this area. 

 The Great Lakes Indians all  speared for sturgeon.  This is a very early sturgeon  decoy made out of a muscle shell  that's part of the Oshkosh  Public Museum collection.  This was definitely a tradition  that when the Europeans came  into the area they witnessed the  Indian tribes in the area doing  this and they copied them  basically.  And how the Great Lakes Indians  would do this is they would put  a blanket over their head and  cut a whole in the ice and lie  down on their stomachs with a  spear and wait to sturgeon to go  by and spear it while they're on  their stomachs with a blanket  over their head.  So this is probably what early  Europeans saw them doing and  tried out for themselves.  Well, what eventually happened,  people decided that it would be  much more comfortable if they  built a shanty where they could  sit and maybe not have to be on  the ice and have a little bit  more warmth.  So what has developed into  modern spearing season, people  all use shanties now.  That's a picture of people  pulling their shanties out onto  frozen Lake Winnebago.  And those are Christmas trees,  actually, on the left there that  some of the fishing clubs set up  so that they kind of mark roads.  Otherwise you're driving around  on Lake Winnebago and you don't  quite know where you are. 

 So like I said, it really hasn't  changed that much.  Basically, what you do is you go  into your shanty, you have a  hole that's in your shanty  that's about the size of a door  now, that's what the legal size  for that hole is.  You hang up your spear.  And you sit there and you wait.  And you can wait a long time.  Some people have been spearing  for decades and never seen a  sturgeon or maybe they saw one  and they missed it.  So you wait for a sturgeon to go  by, and then you throw your  spear down and hope that you hit  it.  And it's quite a fascinating  sport because depending on how  deep the water is there you have  to kind of take into account the  refraction of water.  You don't want to throw it too  soon or too late.  Much of it depends on the  clarity of the water. 

 So if for some reason the water  is cloudy that year it's going  to be very difficult to see a  sturgeon.  If you can't see a sturgeon, you  can't spear it.  I should note that the shanty is  pitch dark.  No light in the shanty, no  windows.  And so when you open up the hole  in this dark shanty, that's what  the hole looks like.  It's almost like looking at a  blank TV screen some people say.  But it's this eerie hue that  kind of comes out.  And it's really mesmerizing.  I sat in a shanty for eight  hours with a kind man who let me  sit in his shanty with him.  Time did go by much faster than  I thought it would. 

 But I have a lot of respect for  people.  It's definitely a patient,  patient sport.  That's what the hole looks like.  So you hang a decoy down, and  the decoy basically, sturgeon  are very curious fish so you  hang something down there to try  and get their attention so that  they'll want to kind of come and  investigate.  They're also bottom dwellers so  you want to get them off the  bottom of the lake so that they  can come up a little bit more so  you can spear them more easily.  And then people often put  something down on the bottom of  the lake that's just two PVC  pipes tied together so there's  something to kind of give you,  especially when the water is  cloudier, you can see that  shadow of the sturgeon going by  a little bit easier.  Like I said there's kind of  stories throughout the book.  There's a story about Harry --  here.  I can't tell probably all the  details to it, but he basically  fell into his hole one winter.  And so it was kind of a series  of misadventures really. 

 He's quite a lucky man.  Luckily a friend saw that the  door of his shanty was open  which would make you think  something must be wrong because  you can't be spearing your  sturgeon.  So his friends came over and  rescued him basically.  But it's always been dangerous  going out onto frozen Lake  Winnebago, and it's still  dangerous today.  There's a long tradition of  women spearers too.  This is Lynn Benedict I think in  the 1950s, '58, she's just an  example of one of the women  spearers that we have in the  book.  Some people say that women are  actually better sturgeon  spearers, and some people say  that's because women might be  more patient.  But sometimes the men are out  talking to their friends and  socializing, and the women tend  to just kind of sit in the  shanty and wait for that  sturgeon so while the men might  be out talk to their friends the  women are actually there  waiting.  So Lynn Benedict actually  started spearing by herself.  She and her husband both went in  separate shanties. 

 And that's her preferred way of  spearing she says now.  That was her first sturgeon  there in 1958.  This is Pat Brosh of Oshkosh.  This is another thing that  happens during spearing season,  if you happen to spear a  sturgeon that's gravid, that has  eggs in it, it's perfectly legal  to make caviar out of that.  It is not legal to sell that  caviar or take it out of the  state.  But you're welcome to make  caviar and give it to your  friends or personal consumption.  So Pat Brosh and her husband  Richard make caviar in their  basement and give it away to  their friends.  So she's scooping some into a  jam jar there.  There's a lot of art associated  with the sturgeon spearing  season.  This is Art Sonnenberg of Van  Dyne, Wisconsin. 

 He makes the sturgeon spears.  Everything basically is  homemade.  The decoys are homemade, the  shanties are homemade, the  spears are homemade.  You can't go out to Cabela's or  Wal-Mart or some other sporting  goods store and buy a sturgeon  spear.  You have to find someone who  makes one in the area.  He's been making sturgeon spears  for quite a long time.  This is what the spearhead of,  there's different designs.  This is a flying barb spearhead  design.  Those barbs, when you throw the  spear into the sturgeon the  barbs will fly out and kind of  secure the spear in the  sturgeon.  Some people swear by that  design, some people don't. 

 Lots of different shanty  designs.  If you go out on the lake you'll  see all sorts of different  designs.  Packers designs.  The decoy carvers, that's a  whole art within itself.  This is George Schmidt of  Appleton.  Some of them learned it from  their fathers, their  grandfathers.  Some of them just kind of picked  it up.  But they're beautiful, beautiful  decoys.  They don't have to be fish to  attract a sturgeon.  But I think a lot of decoy  carvers enjoy carving the fish. 

 And that's another one by Tom  Tittle, I think.  So there are two times during  the year when it's really easy  to go see sturgeon.  One is during the winter, during  spearing season, that's when  you'll probably see a dead  sturgeon.  But to see a live sturgeon you  can head up to the Wolf River in  early spring.  This is a picture of sturgeon  heading up to spawn on the Wolf  River.  And luckily there was a group  about 30 years ago around Lake  Winnebago, this is Bill Casper.  He decided that people around  the area really needed to start  protecting sturgeon themselves  because there was all this  poaching going on up through the  1970s and 1980s.  So in 1977 he formed Sturgeon  for Tomorrow which is a  nonprofit conservation group  specifically to protect sturgeon  in the Lake Winnebago region.  That's a poster that he put up  in 1977 to get people to come to  a meeting to talk about, he was  worried about the sturgeon  population.  He wanted to get some public  commitment to help protect them. 

 That's what sturgeon spawning  looks like up on the Wolf River.  Those are just all sturgeon  congregating up there.  It's quite a scene, and I highly  recommend going to check it out  some year.  But what Bill Casper and  Sturgeon for Tomorrow basically  did was to help support DNR  efforts to learn how to raise  sturgeon in an aquaculture  facility which had never been  done before.  So that started happening about  30 years ago.  And Sturgeon for Tomorrow is now  a group of about 3,000 members.  They're very well organized.  They actually help support the  publication of this book because  they wanted the story of  sturgeon to get out to a wider  audience.  So they helped, actually these  two, Dan -- and Mike --, they're  retired DNR people, and they  worked with Sturgeon for  Tomorrow 30 years ago to help  learn how to do this artificial  propagation.  And this actually is one of my  co-authors, Fred. 

 Fred worked with them as well.  Fred's been researching and  raising sturgeon in his  aquaculture facility at UW  Milwaukee, the Great Lakes Water  Institute, for 30 years now.  So he has a love affair going  with his fish.  Sturgeon for Tomorrow is really,  they're terrific at fundraising,  and they've used a lot of those  funds, over $700,000 now, to  help create better spawning  areas on the Wolf River, and  then also to support the  sturgeon guard.  Which basically anyone can  volunteer to be a sturgeon guard  during the spring.  Ron -- here has been guarding  for several years now.  And basically it's a patrol.  You can sit on the Wolf River  banks for a 12-hour shift, and  you just basically sit there and  make sure nobody grabs a  sturgeon.  And it's been highly effective  at just wiping out poaching.  And basically within the last 20  years poaching has almost been  eliminated. 

 So it's really been a huge turn  around in the public attitude  toward sturgeon.  I should say a little bit too  about, clearly this tradition  started with the Great Lakes  Indians and the Menominee tribe,  which their reservation is up on  the Wolf River.  They have a long history with  sturgeon.  There's a chapter about that in  the book.  This is Chief Oshkosh.  He was responsible in 1854, the  Menominee people were going to  be forced to move to Minnesota,  and they wanted to stay in at  least a portion of their native  range which is here in  Wisconsin.  So he was very responsible to  help to keep the tribe on a  portion of their native range  which is on the Wolf River just  north of Shawano.  And one of the reasons why they  chose that area was actually for  the sturgeon resource.  Sturgeon move up the Wolf River  to spawn, and they used to only  be able to go just as far as  Keshena Falls which is on the  reservation.  So Menominee chose this piece of  land for, one of those reasons  was for sturgeon. 

 But what happened was there was  a dam built in Shawano just  south of the reservation in the  late 1800s.  So that blocked the sturgeon  migration.  So for over 100 years the  Menominee people lost access to  sturgeon.  This is a photo of the dam  today.  What's happened is in or early  1990s a group of Menominee  Indian tribe members decided  they wanted to regain access to  the sturgeon.  So they actually started working  with the DNR to do this, and now  every spring the DNR brings  about 15 sturgeon up to the  Menominee reservation so that  they can have a sturgeon feast  and pow-wow celebration.  Which is kind of renewing an  event that they used to have  over a hundred years ago.  So this is a photo of the DNR  bringing the sturgeon up in a  tanker truck and then members  are unloading them.  They put them in a holding area  to have a ceremony, and then the  feast is about a week later.  So they bring out the  schoolchildren to witness this. 

 The schoolchildren are helping  to release the sturgeon.  That's a nice photo, I like  that.  And then these are some photos  from the sturgeon feast and  pow-wow celebration.  Which I've attended a couple of  times.  And it's open to the public.  It's a wonderful event.  And so the DNR is also working  to bring sturgeon onto the  reservation.  So this is Don Reiter, the  tribal biologist.  And he's been working with the  DNR to raise sturgeon there on  the reservation to bring young  sturgeon there and plant them in  the waters north of this dam.  And then they also bring some  sturgeon, adult sturgeon, up to  the reservation. 

  So this is Don and a DNR  employee bringing some adult  sturgeon to release.  And so the research that the DNR  has been doing for, basically,  probably about 80 years has  helped to be able to bring  sturgeon back to the Menominee  reservation.  So 80 years this is the Trout  Lake Research Facility in  northern Wisconsin.  Sorry, back here.  In 1929 researchers basically  started deciding that they  needed to get some science to  protect this population.  So there's a long history with  the research.  In the 1950s doing some sturgeon  assessments.  This is doing some sturgeon  research today.  So every spring when the  sturgeon are moving up the river  that's a terrific time to do an  assessment of the population.  So DNR employees head out and  capture some of the sturgeon to  weigh them, to tag them and then  they put them back in the water  then. 

 That's right below the Shawano  dam there, that's kind of a  dramatic place to see sturgeon.  So this is measuring sturgeon.  A lot of people show up.  This is a great time for the  public to come out and see the  fish.  This is inserting it's called a  PIT tag.  It's basically the same thing  that people put in their dogs  and cats to keep track of them.  That's how they keep track of  the sturgeon.  So they try and insert as many  of these tags as possible.  So every sturgeon has a unique  number.  They can track it throughout its  life. 

 It's really giving them a lot of  important information about this  population.  And it's important information  that's helping out sturgeon  populations around the world  really.  This is within our country this  is a person who's come from  Tennessee to actually capture  some eggs from some of our Lake  Winnebago sturgeon to help try  and rehabilitate a population  down there.  And this is Fred, my co-author  again, he's mixing up some  batches of sturgeon right there  on the Wolf River.  He basically puts the eggs and  the fish semen together in some  bowls, and he's going to take  them back to his aquaculture  facility to raise some sturgeon  to do some studies to find out  where juvenile sturgeon travel  in the region.  This is Fred and Ron, my  co-authors, in Fred's lab,  inserting one of those PIT tags  into a very young sturgeon.  And Fred also does some radio  monitoring.  He inserts some radio  transmitters into both adult and  young fish to find out where  they're going within the Lake  Winnebago system.  It's given him a lot of  information about what these  fish do.  And this isn't quite how Fred  always tracks the sturgeon but  he loves this photo. 

 This is the Fred Baron, that's  what he calls it.  But basically he'll go up into a  plane and listen for these fish  then that have these tags, and  then he using a GPS unit to be  able to track where they are.  So it's very interesting  research.  And then a lot of research goes  on during the spearing season  too.  The spearing season is highly  regulated.  There are harvest limits set  every year strictly based on  science on what the scientific  assessments have been of the  population.  How much spearing can the  population sustain.  And it's a very, very  conservative limit.  These are two DNR employees  checking out every fish that  comes in.  They determine the sex of the  fish and kind of how old that  fish is, and they use that to  determine okay we've had so many  of this age of fish and this sex  of fish. 

 And they keep track of that  during the spearing season.  As soon as the limit is met they  shut down the spearing season.  These are some researchers from  the University of Manitoba.  They've come to do some sturgeon  research as well.  There's really no other access  to sturgeon like there is on  like Winnebago.  So researchers come from around  the world to access these fish  and to do different studies.  And this is the scene at the  registration stations around  Lake Winnebago at the spearing  season.  Everybody has to come and  register their fish.  So it's quite a scene.  A lot of them are at taverns so  that's always fun. 

 Spawning season is a great time  to do public outreach.  This is Kendall --, he's showing  an interested group of people  the sturgeon's mouth right  there.  The research and the management  that's been going on in  Wisconsin is now extending into  the rest of the Great Lakes  region.  The Great Lakes population of  sturgeon has been much, much  less than the Lake Winnebago  population.  But now things that have been  discovered in Wisconsin through  this hundred years of management  and 80 years of research are now  helping researchers throughout  the Great Lakes region help  sturgeon.  And this is Bruce Manning, he's  from the USGS.  This is a sturgeon from the  Detroit River, which is a place  where people are very surprised  to find out that there still are  some sturgeon.  But there are some spawning  areas there and they've managed  to stick around.  So many different organizations  are partnering now in the  Detroit River to help clean up  some spawning areas and help  these fish kind of make a  comeback.  And they're noticing that  they're having success. 

 It's going to take probably a  hundred years to get to what  Lake Winnebago is but they're  dedicated.  And also in Michigan another  Sturgeon for Tomorrow group has  formed, using Wisconsin as a  template.  This is Brenda Archambo, and she  founded it in Michigan.  So there's another group of  citizen volunteers now who are  joining together to help  sturgeon throughout the Great  Lakes region too.  So basically it's an exciting  story.  It's exciting to see how this  fish has inspired so many  people.  When families talk about their  sturgeon spearing experiences  they just get so excited.  And a lot of spearers will say  that they would much rather be  out spearing than out deer  hunting, which I just find  amazing.  So it's exciting to see that the  excitement is spreading to other  parts of the Great Lakes.  And I think the more access that  people have to this fish to  actually see it and experience  it, I think the more people will  start to develop a relationship  with the fish. 

 And I think I have definitely.  And I'll just end with a  picture.  This is actually my grandfather  on the left there.  The Mississippi River, not on  Lake Winnebago.  But he was a commercial  fisherman, and there he is with  a fine lake sturgeon too.  So I've been hearing these fish  stories for quite a while, and  it's been fun to be able to put  some of these fish stories down  on paper.  So thank you, very much.  (applause)