It’s 9:30 a.m. on Saturday—a chilly, dull, February day in Wisconsin. It’s the kind of day when you could pop your head out of an ice shack and not be sure if it’s morning or late afternoon. Ron Bruch is circling Lake Winnebago in his pickup truck, making the rounds to all of the registration stations dotted around the lake, many of them in the parking lots of local bars and restaurants. He pulls into Wendt’s on the Lake, where he raps on the door of a tiny, heated trailer and heads inside to chat with the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) workers. The small space is teeming with jokes, fish stories, and five-alarm chili. Ron helps himself to all of it. It’s the second weekend of spearing season, and everyone seems to be in high spirits, especially Ron.

Back in the truck, he tunes the radio to 1530 AM, where Jerry Schneider is rolling out polka music all morning long and broadcasting news of successful spearings in between tunes. “When I was a boy, we’d spend our summers up north in Butternut, where my family is from,” Ron says as he turns down the joyful cries of a concertina. “My dad and I would go fishing for walleye on the Flambeau River, and every now and then we’d see a sturgeon jump out of the water. It really made an impression on me. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be working with them like this.”

In fact, Ron’s position is one of only a handful of such jobs in the entire world—managing a self-sustaining population of sturgeon, healthy enough for an annual season of recreational fishing or, in Wisconsin’s case, spearing. Across the globe, in Russia and Iran, sturgeon are pursued for their eggs, the source of an exotic delicacy to be enjoyed by the wealthy. But here in Wisconsin, lake sturgeon belong to everyone, and they’re revered for what they are and have been for millions of years: a tough, old fish.

“A few years ago I was at one of the registration stations, and one of the guys who came in—Don Burg from Chilton—told us about how his great-uncle used to spear with the Stockbridge Indians on Lake Winnebago in the early 1900s,” Ron continues. “I went home that night thinking about what a great story that was and how there are probably a lot more memories and stories out there that might be lost if we don’t collect them.”

At another stop along the lake, a man in Cargill overalls and a Polaris jacket beams as the DNR workers hoist a four-foot frozen sturgeon up onto the scale.

 “That’s my first in twelve years,” the spearer proudly declares. Implicit in his statement is twelve seasons staring into a hole in the ice, straining to see a long, dark shadow and seeing nothing. Twelve years of sitting in the dark, dangling decoys, waiting. And twelve years isn’t even a long time for some other spearers. It’s this type of devotion and perseverance that makes this population of fish, above all other creatures in the state’s boundaries, a rare gem—one that is envied and eyed the world over. And Ron Bruch is only one of many in Wisconsin working diligently to safeguard it.

Ancient Survivors

There are twenty-seven species of sturgeon worldwide, and all of them are found in the waters of the Northern Hemisphere. Most live primarily in the sea, migrating into freshwater to spawn. Only three—the pallid, shovelnose, and lake sturgeon—spend their entire lives in freshwater. All of the species are threatened or endangered in some portion of their original ranges.

Despite their low numbers today, sturgeon are survivors. According to fossil records, they have been on Earth for at least one hundred fifty million years. Dinosaurs died off, glaciers melted, volcanoes blew their tops, but sturgeon continued to swim and spawn in our oceans, lakes, and rivers, even when those very bodies of water underwent enormous change. Lake sturgeon evolved originally in the Mississippi River. When a glacier melted about fourteen thousand years ago, it left behind the Great Lakes and a new home for lake sturgeon. And, up until recent times, they’ve done quite well in both places.

To look at a sturgeon is to gaze back at an ancient world. They have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years, and several of their unique features hearken back to the early evolution of fish. A sturgeon’s tail fin is sharklike, with an upper lobe longer than the lower lobe. It looks like a scythe cutting through wheat as the fish carve their way through shallow water. Also like sharks, a sturgeon’s skeleton is made out of cartilage, the same type of connective tissue as that in the human ear and nose. The backbone is actually a notochord, similar to that of a hagfish or lamprey, and a precursor to the intricate bony column that is filleted out of most fish caught today. Unlike modern fish, sturgeon lack scales. Instead, their skin is tough and thick, topped off with pinched bits of bone called scutes. Five rows of scutes encircle the torpedo-shaped midsection, and a young sturgeon writhing around in your hands can leave painful cuts behind.

For a long time scientists thought the juvenile and adult lake sturgeon were two different species, and looking at both side by side, it’s no wonder. One could say that lake sturgeon “soften” as they age. While a juvenile lake sturgeon has a long, pointy snout, the head of an adult is short and rounded, almost as if it gently eroded away from decades of currents and waves. As the largest fish swimming around in their freshwater homes, they find few predators to contend with once they reach a certain age and size. The sharp, protective scutes dull as they stretch out from years of growth, and the color of the back darkens from a light brown to a murky gray-brown, the same hue as the sediment they cruise above. (Interestingly, ocean-living sturgeon, definitely not the biggest fish in the pond, keep their pronounced scutes throughout their lives.)

Lake sturgeon are bottom dwellers. As they swim close to the bottom of the lake or riverbed, they use their barbels—four “whiskers” at the front of the snout—to feel around for food. Once a sturgeon locates something of interest, it extends a wide, rubbery, tube-like appendage of its mouth and sucks up the food like a powerful vacuum cleaner. Sturgeon primarily stuff themselves on insects such as lakefly larvae, small crustaceans, and clams. But, just like vacuum cleaners, they aren’t too picky about what they suck up. Researchers have often slit open a fish’s stomach to find it filled with sturgeon eggs.

In the spring, the continuous search for food comes to a halt for some love-struck sturgeon, as warm water temperatures trigger an ancient migration and mating ritual. Somewhat like salmon, males and females swim up the river of their birth to find rocky substrate for spawning. Fertilized eggs need plenty of oxygen to survive, so spawning in shallow, rushing water is crucial. In fact, it’s so important that the fish will, literally, go to great lengths to find the perfect spawning site—some have traveled a total of 140 miles across Lake Winnebago and up the Wolf River. In the Great Lakes, a sturgeon that was tagged in southern Lake Huron turned up a few years later near Door County, Wisconsin, a distance of roughly five hundred miles. However, after all that searching for the right spot, no more than one out of every fifty thousand of the eggs released by a female is likely to survive and grow into an adult.

Sturgeon reproduction seems like a wasteful crapshoot—a female expends the energy to produce up to a half million eggs, only to add a handful of progeny to the next generation—but it’s a gamble that has paid off for a long, long time. However, more recently, it’s those hundreds of thousands of eggs—sometimes up to fifty pounds’ worth in a large, fertile female—meant to ensure the future of the species, that have led to its demise. Screened and salted, these small round globs of goo become caviar, one of the most coveted delicacies in the world.

But long before their eggs were packaged for sale to restaurants and cruise ships, lake sturgeon lived in relative peace with the Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region. To be sure, every time the fish congregated to spawn, they were netted, and every winter they were speared through the ice. But with eleven million fish estimated living in Lake Michigan alone at that time, there were plenty to go around.3 In many ways, sturgeon were for many Great Lakes tribes what buffalo were to the Great Plains Indians. Both revered and hunted, the fish provided a stable supply of protein, especially in the spring when larders were low after long, harsh winters. Sturgeon probably kept many tribes from starving, and their scutes were sometimes used in medicines.