Sturgeon spawning behavior includes “breaches,” in which the male fish leaps out of the water. (Photo by Heaton Johnson)
It sounds like a story from the Book of Genesis: For seven years, scientists studying sturgeon on the James River found exactly zero hatchlings born within the last year. Then, in the eighth year, the rains came, and they found more than 200.
In 2005, while in graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University, Matt Balazik initiated a project on Atlantic sturgeon in the James. Now he works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as chief researcher on sturgeon in the river, primarily tagging and tracking adults of the species, but also surveying hatchlings.
“We’ve been looking for young-of-year sturgeon for about a decade,” Balazik says. “We’ve been doing in-depth surveys since 2012, and we never caught one until last fall. Then we caught 272.”
The floodgates, one might say, were opened.
The Perfect Storm
The Atlantic sturgeon is an ancient ocean-dwelling fish that makes spawning runs into freshwater rivers every year. It was once a dominant force in the James, until overfishing and habitat loss dealt a severe blow to its status in the postbellum era, nearly exiling it from the river completely. But in the late 1990s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began to hear reports from commercial watermen that the sturgeon was still around.
Today, the sturgeon population in the James is relatively healthy, Balazik says, though it is impossible to know what the population was like before human impact.
There are four age classifications for a sturgeon: young-of-year, juvenile, sub-adult and adult. Young-of-year sturgeon are born within the last year. Juvenile sturgeon are at least a year old, but have yet to leave their natal river. Once the fish has taken its first journey to the ocean — in the James, that’s around year three — it is called a sub-adult. The sturgeon is not a full adult until it reaches sexual maturity, which is around 10 years for males and 16 for females. A sturgeon can live for 60 years, and, fully grown, typically weighs 90 to 160 pounds and measures 5 to 6 feet in length, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program. The largest sturgeon on record was 14 feet long and weighed more than 800 pounds.
Once the sturgeon reaches adulthood, it returns to freshwater — usually its place of birth — to spawn.
“The young-of-year sturgeon are the barometer of progress,” Balazik says. “Those are the future generations.”
A variety of factors could have led to the sudden deluge of baby fish. The first is a moratorium on fishing ordered in 1998 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which banned fishing and poaching of the Atlantic sturgeon from Maine to Florida. Because it takes females 16 years to reach sexual maturity, many of the fish saved by the moratorium are only recently able to reproduce.
Albert Spells, a fisheries biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, gives credit to James River water quality and the state of Virginia generally for protecting the sturgeon earlier than some other states did.
“The James River never experienced low dissolved oxygen levels like other rivers,” says Spells. “Another thing Virginia has going for it is that we put a moratorium in place in 1974. I’m convinced that, other than its high water quality, the 1974 moratorium is the main reason there are so many sturgeon in the James River, as opposed to other rivers in the Chesapeake Bay [watershed].”
But, like a bumper crop of cotton or corn, the sturgeon crop may find its strongest ally in the record-breaking rainfalls of 2018. The heavy rain allowed access to the fall line, which is some of the best spawning habitat in the James River, and flushed out sediment buildup.
“We knew they were spawning,” says Cyrus Brame, a wildlife refuge specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now we have the smoking gun.”
The Present and the Future
Jamie Brunkow, senior advocacy manager and riverkeeper for the James River Association, says he is encouraged by what he saw last fall.
“We found proof of successful spawning and witnessed an exciting surge of migrating adults,” he says. “Photographers were lining the 14th Street Bridge in downtown Richmond and reporting dozens of breaches.”
Part of the creature’s majestic allure is its peculiar spawning behavior. When the male fish is full of sexual energy, it leaps from the water into the sky.
According to Balazik, there are now between 3,000 and 8,000 adults in the river. Meanwhile, at Presquile National Wildlife Refuge (on an island in the James River north of Hopewell), a new life-size sturgeon sculpture is being installed in the interpretive center, and the James River Association has begun to run sturgeon-watching trips, available to the public, where guests can watch spawning wild sturgeon leap into the air.
Climate change could pose a problem before too long, because saltwater levels are expected to rise upriver, which would limit spawning habitat. But Atlantic sturgeon have a range from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, making them more adaptable than other fish to changing water temperatures.
When asked about the sturgeon’s future, Spells cracks a grin. “The sturgeon has been around since before the Jurassic era, and it outlived the dinosaurs,” he says. “These fish were built to survive.”
