TOLEDO, Ohio (WFFT) — Lake sturgeon are a fish often known as “living fossils.”
The species has been around for at least 150 million years and with little anatomical change throughout history. The species once lived in abundance across the Great Lakes.
However, lake sturgeon have been functionally eliminated from the Lake Erie Watershed since the late 1800s.
“Due to overfishing, habitat loss, and pollution, lake sturgeon have been kind of extirpated in a lot of regions around the Great Lakes,” Dr. Bill Hintz explains. Dr. Hintz is an associate professor at the University of Toledo who helped author a recent investigation analyzing survival rates for an effort to bring this fish back to the Lake Erie Watershed…