Mountain-Prairie Region

Missouri River News and Information

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has documented the first natural reproduction of endangered pallid sturgeon in the Missouri River in decades.

Service biologists collected several tiny sturgeon specimens near a restored backwater section of the river at Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge near Columbia, Missouri in August, and just-completed laboratory analysis shows that one of the fish is definitely a pallid sturgeon and two others likely are.

Steve Krentz, leader of the Pallid Sturgeon Recovery team based in Bismarck, N.D., welcomed the news. "This is wonderful. Until these were found, the only young pallid sturgeon we'd seen were products of spawning operations at hatcheries."

Service officials were delighted that the rare find took place in a restored reach of river. Jim Milligan, project leader of the Service's Fishery Resource Office in Columbia, Missouri, whose staff actually collected the fish, borrowed a line from a movie to describe the sturgeon's choice of habitat. "It's the old `build it and they will come' philosophy.

Nature recreated suitable habitat with the higher river flows of the mid-1990's, and the pallids have found and are using that habitat."

Those comments were echoed by Mike Olson, Missouri River coordinator for the Service. "It wasn't as much of a surprise as it was confirmation of our beliefs," he said. "We firmly believed that this species just needed the right habitat and flow conditions, and this finding is proof."

Pallid sturgeon populations have been on a downward spiral since dams were built and their habitat was altered from the preferred shallow, silty rivers with sand and gravel bars. "We've said all along that the pallid sturgeon's problem has been a lack of habitat and proper flows," noted Olson.

An adult pallid sturgeon is a rare find these days in the Missouri River system, and biologists had not been able to find any evidence of natural reproduction by the species in more than 30 years.

In the early 1990's, the Fish and Wildlife Service and its state partners began a hatchery reproduction program. Crews netted adult male and female fish in the wild, and brought them into hatcheries for artificial spawning. Some of the offspring from those operations were stocked into the Missouri River in the 1990's, but biologists said they only resorted to that method to keep the species alive until habitat and flows could be restored.

"We know the fish found in Missouri are not the result of our stocking efforts," explained Krentz. "The juvenile fish we put into the river were eight or ten inches long, and the specimens collected in August were less than one inch long."

All three believe the evidence of reproduction doesn't mean the species is out of trouble, but feel the discovery is an encouraging step forward. The Service, Missouri River Basin states and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to restore habitat and flows important to fish and wildlife throughout the entire length of the river, according to Olson. "This newest finding confirms that habitat in conjunction with more natural river flows Is a. successful combination for fish and wildlife recovery."

The pallid sturgeon dates to prehistoric times. It can weigh up to 80 pounds, has rows of bony plates running from head to tail, and has four whisker-like appendages in front of its mouth. It was fairly common as late as the 1950's and 1960's, but was placed on the Endangered Species List in 1990 after observations became uncommon in such pallid strongholds as North Dakota.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting, and enhancing fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 93-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System comprising more than 500 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands, and other special management areas. It also operates 66 national fish hatcheries and 78 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces Federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Aid program that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state wildlife agencies.

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