With August well behind us, the Nelson River Sturgeon Co-Management Board (NRSB) has wrapped up its operations for the season, releasing a new generation of lake sturgeon to replenish the once-brimming Nelson River system. I had the opportunity to catch a flight with Manitoba Sustainable Development earlier this summer out to Landing River, the primary site that the NRSB has utilized to collect sturgeon for spawning.
The NRSB was founded in 1993 by Ernie Scott in Cross Lake, shortly after the commercial sturgeon fishery had been closed due to severe depletion. Sturgeon were once a cornerstone of traditional Cree life in the summer months: the massive fish would provide ample meat to feed a family through the winter seasons, with bones useful for creating needles and arrowheads, and bladders that secreted a useful adhesive.
But while sturgeon had been a staple of the traditional Cree diet, it wouldn’t be until the mid-19th century that European markets would clamour for sturgeon products, both in the form of caviar and adult sturgeon meat, which was smoked and sold as a substitute for halibut. By the turn of the 20th century, yields in some sturgeon fisheries had dropped almost 90 per cent in a less than a decade. Northern Manitoba’s own sturgeon fishery has been closed and reopened several times since it was opened in the 1900s, before finally closing in 1993.
The year the Nelson River commercial fishery closed was the year that Ernie Scott founded the Nelson River Sturgeon Co-management Board, made up of representatives from Norway House, Cross Lake, Wabowden, Thicket Portage Pikwitonei, Split Lake and York Factory. The board’s initial priority was to establish long-term tracking of sturgeon stocks throughout the Nelson River area, spanning Sea Falls, Bladder Rapids, Landing River, Jenpeg and the Playgreen Lake area.
Marcel Pronteau was one of the members out at Landing River in June, along with Carl and Alex Garrioch and Frank Dorion. He noted that the largest challenge was to gain community support early in the project. Many modern research and tagging techniques remain controversial among traditional northern fishermen, sometimes viewed as a contamination of a precious resource. Nonetheless, Pronteau notes, “Once they started realizing what we were doing, they started backing off.”
It was telling that there was a moment of hesitation when I asked Pronteau and the other workers why they were there, unsure, it seems, of what I meant. For Dorion, the sturgeon fishery was an integral part of life. “Our parents were commercial fishermen. We grew up on this river.”
“River people,” Carl Garrioch would later add. “That’s what they called us.”
The NRSB’s operations are supported by Manitoba Sustainable Development and Manitoba Hydro, providing technical services such as tagging, data analysis, and the services of the Grand Rapids Fish Hatchery, where sturgeon are kept for up to a year before being released into the river system. Supporting staff from Manitoba Hydro Manitoba Sustainable Development, and supporting organizations were milling about that week for the spawning itself, but Carl Garrioch, Alex Garrioch, Pronteau and Dorion had already been out at the camp for the better part of a month, setting up camp and facilities and collecting sturgeon for selection.
How has the project fared? What the NRSB’s research throughout the 1990s found was an aging population shrinking with every subsequent harvest: sturgeon’s long reproductive cycle make them particularly prone to rapid decimation of breeding-age fish. Lake sturgeon may not reach sexual maturity until they are over 20 years of age, leaving little breeding stock to replace previous generations. Limitations were placed on harvests: families were expected to harvest only one sturgeon apiece, they are not to be fished prior to June 16, and larger sturgeon, usually females, are to be released.
But there is a wild card in the deck: sturgeon surveys will not detect sturgeon populations below 20 years of age. When initial tagging was suspended in 2000, biologists and board members could do little but wait with bated breath to see if a new generation of sturgeon would emerge, and of what quality.
Resumption of surveys in 2006 has yielded mixed results. Unfortunately, the Bladder Rapids area has struggled throughout the process; biologists currently believe that numbers have likely declined. But current surveys suggest that lake sturgeon populations have roughly doubled between 2006 and 2014 averaged across the region: Playgreen Lake has shown particular success in establishing a new young population within its waters, and operations in Sea Falls are gaining steam as techniques are refined.
Landing River, the spawning site, has been left to recover for the most part naturally, with minimal re-stocking. While the run has not recovered, new spawning grounds have been found, and smaller fish are emerging.
