Thomas Marx
Forced Symbiosis
I have been sitting under this bridge since 4:00 p.m. The sun is setting it must be
at least 7:30. The crown of the sun peeks above the horizon. It is late September, the tops
of the maples the red leaves burn red in the last breath of daylight. The sun is setting
behind me the little light I receive is being sucked up by the black water of the river. It is
getting cooler with as every minute passes, I can see my breath. I sit patiently, waiting for
a break in the action.
My fishing rod falls over. I had it propped up against some rocks. It has been a
breezy afternoon and this is the third time the wind has knocked it over. I look around
for a larger rock to secure it, when I realize it wasn’t the wind this time and there is an
actual fish on the line. I slowly reel in the slack, count to ten and set the hook. It sets like
a log and begins to pull. The fish pulls back hard. It pulls hard downstream I pull harder
upstream. It is not rattling the graphite like a salmon or bass would, but pulls consistently
like a school bus on a leash. It makes wide turns full of power. Slow and steady I reel this
fish in, cranking away like a winch. What could pull this hard? Catfish, carp, cod? No
cod in the Chippewa. I am not fighting this fish, but pulling it as if dragging a log from
the bottom of the river. As it approaches shore a faint silhouette materializes from the
dark depths. It is long and torpedo shaped, not a carp. A nose breaks the surface, not a
catfish. I lead the fish to shore and see a giant whiskered face. It is a sturgeon. Our eyes
meet and in a flash it makes one big pull downstream. I chase the fish, letting it take as
much line as it wants; I don’t want to lose it. I am winded after sprinting thirty yards in
my rubber boots and from the excitement of having such a tremendous fish on my line. I
can see this is going to be a test of endurance.
If sturgeon are good at one thing, it is endurance. They appeared in the fossil
record about 150 million years ago. This was during the Jurassic period, the same time
dinosaurs like the stegosaurus walked the earth. Sturgeon have been classified as a living
fossil. Living fossils are living organisms that have little or no change morphologically
when compared to fossils of their ancestors. They have remained unchanged for 150
million years. There is no use improving on perfection. They found their niche on the
bottom of lakes and thrived with no reason to change. They can withstand droughts that
lower the water levels. Since they live in deep water, the pools they reside in are the last
to dry up. They also are more resilient to the low oxygen levels during droughts, because
they are used to the lack of oxygen in deep water. During their 150 million year run the
earth had several ice ages, hot spells and several extinction events and yet the sturgeon
flourished. They have no problem with food shortages, because they are not picky eaters.
They do not have to compete for food. Sturgeon love to agitate the river bottom and eat
dead fish, worms, leeches, clams and aquatic insects. Their niche at the bottom of rivers
and lakes has allowed them to defy the odds of extinction. They also have very few
predators, but human beings are proficient predator.
In the 1800s Lake sturgeon were present in all of the Great Lakes and tributaries.
It is estimated that sturgeon made up 90 percent of the biomass in the Great Lakes then.
When white settlers arrived and started to fish the Great Lakes commercially, sturgeon
were caught as by-catch. Lake sturgeon were considered a junk fish and fishermen,
because they were so big and wrecked fishing nets. Fishermen threw the carcasses on
shore. When the sturgeon were sufficiently dried out by the sun steamboat operators
burned the carcasses if they were low on fuel.
By the late 1880s the public acquired a taste for smoked sturgeon and their caviar.
Their swim-bladders were harvested for their isinglass. Isinglass is a type of collagen
found in fish-bladders and it is used to clarify beer and jellies. The status of sturgeon
shifted from a nuisance to a delicacy. Just as sturgeon were being harvested in the Great
Lakes for food purposes, logging operations were damming up the rivers and greatly
reducing the spawning mobility of Lake sturgeon in inland waters. These factors
combined with the sturgeon’s slow maturity rate resulted in a complete crash in the fish’s
population. It is estimated that sturgeon populations were reduced to only 10-15 percent
of what they were before white settlers arrived. The 150 million year old design of
sturgeon was no match for the exploits of human beings.
Sturgeon do not fare well against the exploits of human beings. They are slowgrowing and late to mature. This slow growth allows plenty of time for pollutants like
mercury, a naturally occurring toxic element, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) a
man-made toxic chemical found in coolant, to build up in the fish’ fat tissues. Other
species of fish have a shorter life-span and these chemicals do not have time to reach
toxic amounts. Another disadvantage for sturgeon is their late maturing age. Males do not
reach spawning age until they are about fifteen years old and are about 45 inches long,
and females take nearly 25 years to reach spawning maturity and are about 55 inches
long. To make matters worse, females only spawn once every three to five years. When a
sturgeon population is overfished it is therefore extremely difficult for sturgeon to replace
the individuals that were caught.
I stay behind the fish and reel in the slack line. I hold the rod out in my right hand
leading the fish to the bank and I use my left to grab the tail. The sturgeon thrashes when
I grab its tail. It shakes my whole body. I drag it tail first onto shore. I stand in awe,
studying this ancient fish. The nose is long and spade-like. It is a cartilage shovel made
by nature to dig up the mud on the river floor. There are four barbels before the mouth.
They hang straight down with no curve they just dangle, forming a mud rake made to
taste for food, like clams, leeches and dead fish in the mud. It has two black pearls for
eyes on the side of its head. It has a lippy horizontal mouth with no teeth and little chin.
Rows of pointy scutes create five lines across the fish’s body, two on each side and one
that follows the spine. There is a curved scar across its back. The scar is as big as my
thumb and as deep as my little finger. It looks like it got hit by a boat propeller at some
point. It is short too, only 32 inches long, and I need at least five feet of fish to be able to
keep it.
At 32 inches it is only eight to ten years old and only weighs ten pounds. At this
young age, it is impossible to determine the sex. The simplest way of determining the sex
of a non-spawning fish is to cut it open and look at the gonads or by placing the fish in a
MRI machine. However, when sturgeon are spawning all one must do is squeeze the fish
if black roe (fish eggs) oozes out she is a female if milky milt (fish sperm) squirts out he
is a male. Fish biologists have perfected this fish squeezing technique. Every spring
between April and May biologists on the Black river in Wisconsin capture spawning
sturgeon. They squeeze out the roe and milt from adult fish and conceive the next
generation in a bowl. They take the fertilized eggs back to their facility and raise the fish.
After a year or two the sturgeon are relocated to waters where sturgeon populations are
low or non-existent in an effort to correct the mismanagement of the past.
If this management program did not exist, sturgeon would have vanished from
Wisconsin waters long ago. The greed and ignorance of our ancestors reduced the natural
population of sturgeon. The expansion of industry eliminated the spawning mobility of
sturgeon. Their slow maturity rate cannot replenish the population fast enough to keep up
with the demand of human beings. The perfect design that lasted 150 million years is
incompatible with the lifestyle of human beings. In order to ensure the survival of this
species, we have taken control of their population, with strict harvest limits and hatchery
management. They cannot live with us, without us.
It lies writhing and dying on the sand and all my gear is thirty yards upstream. I
run back and snatch up my backpack. I fumble through it looking for pliers. Seconds tick
away like hours. The sturgeon is thirty yards away gasping for air, slowly choking to
death. I sprint back with my pliers and assess the situation. The hook is deep in its mouth.
I find the pliers and grab the fish. I follow the line down its gullet and poke around for the
hook the darkness outside makes it difficult to do this quickly. I remove the hook with the
surgical accuracy of an optometrist. There is blood coming out of its gills. My shaking
hands are covered with slime and blood. I gently place the beast back in the river and it
floats belly up.
I can’t believe I killed this fish, it will take another ten years to replace what I
carelessly killed. I have ended the 150 million year old family tree. I have negated the
efforts of the hatchery programs. I grab its tail and start rocking her back and forth in the
water. I desperately push water through its gills in effort to perform fish cpr. There is
stillness in the air. The crickets are hushed; it seems like the whole area is watching me as
if 8 holding its breath. The only noise is the wake of my fish cpr.
I stop.
It floats suspended with a pectoral fin poking out of the water. It begins to drift
downstream like a log. I stand there on the shoreline plagued with guilt, wishing I had
never caught this fish, not if it had to end like this. I stare at my victim and a see a twitch
and then SWOOSH! It is back to life and with a sweep of the tail it glides off into the
black water to live another day.