Endangered
Lake sturgeon
Acipenser fulvescens
Lake sturgeon is a ray-finned fish in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser fulvescens, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The lake sturgeon uses its elongated, spade-like snout to stir up the substrate and sediments on the beds of rivers and lakes to feed.
Lake sturgeons can grow to a large size for freshwater fish, up to 7.25 ft (2.2 m) long and 240 lbs (108 kg).
Range and habitat
This species occurs in the Mississippi River drainage basin south to Alabama and Mississippi and east to the French Broad River in western North Carolina. It occurs in the Great Lakes, Lake Winnebago System, and the Detroit River, east down the St. Lawrence River to the limits of fresh water.
It is considered "Vulnerable" by NatureServe.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Observations suggest lake sturgeon and other fish and invertebrates likely consume some fertilized eggs while on the spawning grounds. Males spawn every 2 to 7 years while females spawn every 4 to 9 years.
Four sensory organs (barbels) hang near its mouth to help the sturgeon locate bottom-dwelling prey.
In crisis
Currently, 19 of the 20 states within the fish's original U.S. Range list it as either threatened or endangered. It is vulnerable to population declines through overfishing due to its extremely slow reproductive cycle. Most individuals caught before 20 years of age have never bred and females spawn only once every four or five years. The specific harvesting of breeding females for their roe is also damaging to population size.
Few individuals ever reach the extreme old age or large size that those of previous generations often did.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Lake sturgeon is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Lake sturgeon, Wikidata item Q1387932. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
