The Tennessee Aquarium’s longest-running conservation program is celebrating major developments that have biologists and wildlife managers brimming with excitement.
This week, the Aquarium honored the 25th anniversary of the first Lake Sturgeon release in 2000 with a public event on the northern shore of the Tennessee River in downtown Chattanooga.
There, about 500 juvenile Lake Sturgeon measuring 6 to 12 inches long were ferried to the water’s edge in clear plastic buckets and released into the river by a group of invited officials, community leaders and other special guests, including 46 students from Hixson High School.
Massive, ancient and long-lived, the Lake Sturgeon has been extirpated (locally extinct) in Tennessee since the 1970s. The effort to re-establish this state-imperiled species began in 1998 with the formation of the Southeast Lake Sturgeon Working Group, a collaborative partnership between non-profits like the Aquarium as well as universities and state and federal agencies…