EDITORIAL: The life and times of a prehistoric fish

The enduring icon of Port Washington’s fishing history was reintroduced to Ozaukee Press readers recently in a feature story about the artist who made the statue of a fisherman overlooking the harbor with an enormous fish slung over his shoulder.

The image, created almost a century ago as the logo for Smith Bros. Fisheries, has been rendered in ink on restaurant menus, stationery, newspaper, magazine and book pages, paint on signs and building walls, dye on coffee cups, in neon in a 12-foot high version that still stands fully lighted on the former Smith Bros. Fish Shanty restaurant building in downtown Port Washington, as well as in the bronze of statue.

Among the countless numbers of people who have seen and admired the nostalgic image there surely have been many who assumed it was caricature. Could a fish as big as a man really be caught in Lake Michigan?

Yes, and the image is real. The logo is an accurate rendition of a photo taken in Port Washington in the 1930s. The fisherman with a sou’wester on his head, a pipe in his mouth and a fish over his shoulder was a Smith Bros. employee. The fish was a 200-pound sturgeon.

By the time the picture was made, sturgeon were swimming close to the edge of extinction in Lake Michigan and they soon all but disappeared.

Now, more than 90 years later, there are hopeful signs the sturgeon population is recovering, and Ozaukee County is a crucial contributor to this remarkable rescue of a species that has been a piece of life on Earth for eons.

Scientists estimate that 99% of the species on the planet have already become extinct, but the threat to the survival of the sturgeon has a particularly troubling significance, for the fish is one of Earth’s greatest survivors.

Sturgeon have been here for more than 150 million years, alive in freshwater before dinosaurs evolved and then disappeared. They are prehistoric and look that way with their prominent snouts, whiskerlike growths around their toothless mouths and bony armor on their bodies. They can grow to seven feet long, weigh as much as 300 pounds and live 150 years.

They also produce prodigious quantities of eggs. The sturgeon roe, prized as caviar that made the market value of the fish irresistible to commercial fishers, hastened their near demise.

Overfishing was not the only cause of the decimation of the sturgeon population. Sturgeon were born in the rivers that flow into the lake and returned to them to spawn. Damns and industrial pollution made the rivers untenable for the ancient species to follow its reproductive instincts.

Which is why there was great excitement on March 30 when a sturgeon was tracked by an implanted transponder and photographed with an underwater camera swimming upstream in the Milwaukee River in Ozaukee County. The 50-inch-long fish swam through a fishway around the Mequon-Thiensville Dam and continued northward.

The sturgeon had been implanted with a tracking chip when it was released in the river in 2011 after being raised in a riverside pen.

Another sturgeon was tracked by its transponder swimming through the passage around the dam a few days after the first one was detected, kindling hopes that there are significant numbers in the river.

The restoration effort, named the Return the Sturgeon Project, is led by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in partnership with the Riveredge Nature Center in the Town of Saukville. But its success is attributable in large part to the Ozaukee County government’s ambitious, yearslong project to create fish passages as part of the restoration of the Milwaukee River.

The county has invested an amazing total of $25 million in the project, most of it from grants adroitly applied for and managed by Andrew Struck, director of the Ozaukee County Planning and Parks Department.

Without the department’s accomplishments of removing the Lime Kiln Park dam in Grafton in 2010 and creating the fishway at the Mequon-Thiensville dam, the sturgeon restoration program would have no hope of success. Ichthyologists say the sturgeons would need to swim at least as far north as Grafton’s Bridge Street dam to reach the most promising spawning habitat.

The county’s role in the historic return of the sturgeon is of a piece with its extraordinary environmental work preserving distinctive natural areas and making them accessible to the public. Standouts in these efforts, which make Ozaukee a conservation leader among Wisconsin counties, are the Lion’s Den and Clay Bluffs Cedar Gorge Nature Preserves.

As for the sturgeon, if the expected flourishing of its river and lake population is realized, that sculpture of a fisherman and the prey he caught will represent both the sad loss and the uplifting recovery of a noble survivor.