<blockquote>
</blockquote>Just for a moment, queue up that menacing, impending-doom duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh soundtrack from "Jaws" while thinking of that description of the shark.
Physically, it perfectly illustrates the white sturgeon species common to Northern California and the West Coast: the tiny black beads-for-eyes, way too small for its gargantuan body and useless in the murky depths where it lurks.
And though the white sturgeon is no man-eater like the great white of the film, there's one more thing before we leave Amity for the Sacramento River Delta. It's that telling scene when Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) turns to hired shark-killer Quint, a cigarette rolling port to starboard across his lips, and says: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
That would be good advice today for anybody hoping to land a sturgeon, nicknamed "diamondback" for its skin's darkly beautiful design, and prized in these parts for its size and prehistoric pedigree.
Sturgeon, you see, can reach a length of 20 feet, longer than your typical fishing boat. Kevin Yost, owner of Lucky Strike Fishing, specializing in fishing for sturgeon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, has caught sturgeon over 10 feet long as recently as 2007. He's talked to commercial divers who while working near Mare Island have seen sturgeon much larger.
These behemoths swim mostly unseen under the noses of folks living and playing around the Sacramento River, the Delta and San Francisco Bay.
Plenty of sturgeon far larger than the official, 968-pound, 9-footer have been pulled from the Sacramento River. Just last year on the Fraser River in British Columbia someone caught and released an 11-footer.
The only reason the record has not been broken is that all states that are home to the largest of the species – the white sturgeon – have adopted regulations that forbid the taking of fish above a certain size (5 feet, 6 inches in length in California). Fishery regulators believe the largest sturgeon are females, which may not reach spawning maturity until they are 15 years old and may spawn only once every four to 10 years.
When they do spawn, they can produce 100,000 to millions of tiny eggs. They go up the rivers to spawn in the early spring and can stay into June. They typically frequent the main stems of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, although a few might head up the Feather River when flows are high.
Not so sharky
Before you go into a panic and run down the streets of Old Sacramento screaming "Sturgeon! Sturgeon!" (Doesn't have the same ring as "Shark! Shark!" does it?), you should chill.
A sturgeon's size, eyes, and other characteristics (skeletal structure like a shark's: cartilage rather than bones) are similar to a shark's. Its heritage, too. Sturgeon have been swimming virtually unchanged, like sharks, since dinosaurs walked the earth. No wonder sturgeon are called living fossils.
But there are important differences. Unless one fell on you or you had a heart attack trying to land it, sturgeon are harmless to humans.
The most important distinction between a sturgeon and a shark is at the business end – the mouth. Sharks, particularly meat-eating sharks like the great white, have teeth, lots of them, that are made for cutting and shredding.
At best, a sturgeon could try to lip or gum you. Its mouth is guarded by four white, rubbery barbels that form a picket fence in front of it. The sturgeon relies on these sensors to find and snarf up just about anything that will fit through its suction hose: clams, crawdads, eels, small fish and the eggs and body parts of larger fish.
That's it for offense. The only defense of the fish is its ability to escape and those diamond-shaped, armorlike plates that line its body.
Fished and protected
Sturgeon have long been coveted by humans for their caviar (salt-cured fish eggs). Europe's nobility and rich have savored caviar since the 1400s.
Lots of people in the United States have developed a taste for it, too – so long as their wallets are fat enough. A 1-ounce tin of caviar from farm-raised white sturgeon can be bought at Corti Brothers in east Sacramento for $69.99. That's $1,119.84 a pound, and it's not even the prized and now, sadly, rare, Beluga caviar.
Poaching has driven the Beluga sturgeon of the Caspian Sea, where they are found, to the point of extinction.
Meanwhile, more people are discovering that the firm, white flesh of a sturgeon is good to eat, particularly broiled and smoked. Sturgeon are taking on greater importance as a game fish because of its size and fighting abilities and as anglers compensate for the declines in other fisheries, such as salmon.
While poaching is a continuing problem in Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, conservation measures have been put in place limiting the number that can be caught and the size that can be kept to take some pressure off under- and oversized sturgeon.
Some results from changes
It's too early to tell, but sturgeon fishing regulations instituted in 2006 may help preserve the species, which cannot be fished commercially.
Marty Gingras, supervising fisheries biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, credits those regulatory changes with providing an immediate benefit including increased sport-catch rates.
Highlights of the changes include restricting the take to three white sturgeon annually; they must be between 46 and 66 inches long; and each kept sturgeon must be tagged. However, loss of habitat, pollution and poaching still threaten their future.
Even more protected is the green sturgeon, the other sturgeon species found along the West Coast. They can't be fished, sport or commercially. They tend to swim farther into the Sacramento River system than the white sturgeon, which may help explain the lower numbers.
"The green sturgeon are especially vulnerable, because they go so far up the river," said Gingras, "and they've lost so much of their habitat because of the dams."
For example, last year 10 of these relatively rare fish were found dead within a short time at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, apparently trapped and killed when they tried to swim upstream under the dam gates. Other threats, Gingras said, include rising water temperatures from climate change and increasing diversions of fresh water.
As Gingras points out, sturgeon have had cycles of overfishing followed by conservation for generations.
"In California, Oregon and Washingtion, green sturgeon and white sturgeon were overfished in the late 1800s," he wrote in an e-mail to us for this story. "As a consequence, those fisheries were closed – more or less continuously – until the 1950s. Restrictions on harvest of green sturgeon and white sturgeon have been increasing ever since. Green sturgeon in California are listed as threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act. White sturgeon in California are rated as 'conservation dependent' by the American Fisheries Society."
<blockquote>
A sturgeon angler carries his catch from the Pittsburg docks.</blockquote>
http://www.sacbee.com/fishing_hunting/stor...Fishing/Hunting
</blockquote>Just for a moment, queue up that menacing, impending-doom duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh soundtrack from "Jaws" while thinking of that description of the shark.
Physically, it perfectly illustrates the white sturgeon species common to Northern California and the West Coast: the tiny black beads-for-eyes, way too small for its gargantuan body and useless in the murky depths where it lurks.
And though the white sturgeon is no man-eater like the great white of the film, there's one more thing before we leave Amity for the Sacramento River Delta. It's that telling scene when Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) turns to hired shark-killer Quint, a cigarette rolling port to starboard across his lips, and says: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
That would be good advice today for anybody hoping to land a sturgeon, nicknamed "diamondback" for its skin's darkly beautiful design, and prized in these parts for its size and prehistoric pedigree.
Sturgeon, you see, can reach a length of 20 feet, longer than your typical fishing boat. Kevin Yost, owner of Lucky Strike Fishing, specializing in fishing for sturgeon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, has caught sturgeon over 10 feet long as recently as 2007. He's talked to commercial divers who while working near Mare Island have seen sturgeon much larger.
These behemoths swim mostly unseen under the noses of folks living and playing around the Sacramento River, the Delta and San Francisco Bay.
Plenty of sturgeon far larger than the official, 968-pound, 9-footer have been pulled from the Sacramento River. Just last year on the Fraser River in British Columbia someone caught and released an 11-footer.
The only reason the record has not been broken is that all states that are home to the largest of the species – the white sturgeon – have adopted regulations that forbid the taking of fish above a certain size (5 feet, 6 inches in length in California). Fishery regulators believe the largest sturgeon are females, which may not reach spawning maturity until they are 15 years old and may spawn only once every four to 10 years.
When they do spawn, they can produce 100,000 to millions of tiny eggs. They go up the rivers to spawn in the early spring and can stay into June. They typically frequent the main stems of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, although a few might head up the Feather River when flows are high.
Not so sharky
Before you go into a panic and run down the streets of Old Sacramento screaming "Sturgeon! Sturgeon!" (Doesn't have the same ring as "Shark! Shark!" does it?), you should chill.
A sturgeon's size, eyes, and other characteristics (skeletal structure like a shark's: cartilage rather than bones) are similar to a shark's. Its heritage, too. Sturgeon have been swimming virtually unchanged, like sharks, since dinosaurs walked the earth. No wonder sturgeon are called living fossils.
But there are important differences. Unless one fell on you or you had a heart attack trying to land it, sturgeon are harmless to humans.
The most important distinction between a sturgeon and a shark is at the business end – the mouth. Sharks, particularly meat-eating sharks like the great white, have teeth, lots of them, that are made for cutting and shredding.
At best, a sturgeon could try to lip or gum you. Its mouth is guarded by four white, rubbery barbels that form a picket fence in front of it. The sturgeon relies on these sensors to find and snarf up just about anything that will fit through its suction hose: clams, crawdads, eels, small fish and the eggs and body parts of larger fish.
That's it for offense. The only defense of the fish is its ability to escape and those diamond-shaped, armorlike plates that line its body.
Fished and protected
Sturgeon have long been coveted by humans for their caviar (salt-cured fish eggs). Europe's nobility and rich have savored caviar since the 1400s.
Lots of people in the United States have developed a taste for it, too – so long as their wallets are fat enough. A 1-ounce tin of caviar from farm-raised white sturgeon can be bought at Corti Brothers in east Sacramento for $69.99. That's $1,119.84 a pound, and it's not even the prized and now, sadly, rare, Beluga caviar.
Poaching has driven the Beluga sturgeon of the Caspian Sea, where they are found, to the point of extinction.
Meanwhile, more people are discovering that the firm, white flesh of a sturgeon is good to eat, particularly broiled and smoked. Sturgeon are taking on greater importance as a game fish because of its size and fighting abilities and as anglers compensate for the declines in other fisheries, such as salmon.
While poaching is a continuing problem in Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, conservation measures have been put in place limiting the number that can be caught and the size that can be kept to take some pressure off under- and oversized sturgeon.
Some results from changes
It's too early to tell, but sturgeon fishing regulations instituted in 2006 may help preserve the species, which cannot be fished commercially.
Marty Gingras, supervising fisheries biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, credits those regulatory changes with providing an immediate benefit including increased sport-catch rates.
Highlights of the changes include restricting the take to three white sturgeon annually; they must be between 46 and 66 inches long; and each kept sturgeon must be tagged. However, loss of habitat, pollution and poaching still threaten their future.
Even more protected is the green sturgeon, the other sturgeon species found along the West Coast. They can't be fished, sport or commercially. They tend to swim farther into the Sacramento River system than the white sturgeon, which may help explain the lower numbers.
"The green sturgeon are especially vulnerable, because they go so far up the river," said Gingras, "and they've lost so much of their habitat because of the dams."
For example, last year 10 of these relatively rare fish were found dead within a short time at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, apparently trapped and killed when they tried to swim upstream under the dam gates. Other threats, Gingras said, include rising water temperatures from climate change and increasing diversions of fresh water.
As Gingras points out, sturgeon have had cycles of overfishing followed by conservation for generations.
"In California, Oregon and Washingtion, green sturgeon and white sturgeon were overfished in the late 1800s," he wrote in an e-mail to us for this story. "As a consequence, those fisheries were closed – more or less continuously – until the 1950s. Restrictions on harvest of green sturgeon and white sturgeon have been increasing ever since. Green sturgeon in California are listed as threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act. White sturgeon in California are rated as 'conservation dependent' by the American Fisheries Society."
<blockquote>
A sturgeon angler carries his catch from the Pittsburg docks.</blockquote>
http://www.sacbee.com/fishing_hunting/stor...Fishing/Hunting
