Fish of the Week: green sturgeon

The species that made a girl start swimming with the fishies.

By Ariana Wilson

We stopped at a rest stop in Washington for the first time in what felt like a million years. Little did I know, that last stop of our cross-country roadtrip would alter my brain chemistry so much that it’d inspire a story in the Lumberjack. 

The green sturgeon. 

I was convinced that this fish could have swallowed me whole, and you would have been hard-pressed to change my mind that this magnificent fish was not, in fact, a shark. Looking back on my youth, this could also be the origin for my love for the ocean and scuba diving. Green sturgeon are anadromous fish meaning, like me, they can live or dive in both fresh and saltwater.

Twenty-seven species of sturgeon can be found in the Northern Hemisphere, with two that migrate along the west coast: the green sturgeon and the white sturgeon. The green sturgeon was first discovered in the San Francisco Bay in 1857. The white sturgeon was first scientifically observed in California in 1967.

These fish are gentle giants, taking time to reach sexual maturity around age 15 and living up to 60 to 70 years old. If you’re lucky, you may see an occasional green sturgeon in Humboldt County. Students in the fisheries and wildlife department are currently conducting research on their presence and activity in our local waters. 

These fish are often compared to sharks. While the two do share similar features, alas, sturgeon have some key differences — their lack of teeth, the ability to use their flexible “lips” to suck up food, and their skeleton which is composed of cartilage and a series of external plates called scutes, to name a few. Throughout their complex lives, green sturgeon will spawn multiple times and return to their home rivers every three to five years. 

Green sturgeon’s numbers have been rapidly declining due to anthropogenic harvest and destruction of spawning habitat. This prevents the reproduction of their offspring from leaving the rivers they are spawned in to explore the wide expanse of the ocean. With researchers and grants, Humboldt students can be active participants in sturgeon’s increasing population in Northern California.

Ariana Wilson is an incoming senior staring down her last year of undergrad. As a journalist and budding scientist borrowing words from Einstein, “The important thing is to never stop questioning.” With that, I am oFISHally done with this semester.