A Little Bit More
Although sturgeons may not be one of our more beautiful fishes, I think most would agree that they’re certainly one of our more interesting. If you found one of these strange looking creatures in your local body of water, you might even be a bit fearful at first – they’re completely harmless. Sturgeon are mostly cartilage – sharks are mostly cartilage too - but do have bony plates along their body.
All but one of the world’s 27 species of sturgeon live at least part of their lives in brackish (mix of fresh and salt) or salt water but travel into freshwater to spawn. Only the Lake Sturgeon, found in the upper Midwest and central Canada, remains in freshwater all of its life.
There are seven species of sturgeon living in North America. Although often described as an enormous fish, sturgeon aren’t all giants; the different species do vary in their size and longevity. The Shovelnose Sturgeon pictured in the poster, is a smaller species and only reaches a length of 3 feet and weight of 6 pounds. Sturgeon feed on the bottom finding a variety of foods including insect larvae, crayfish, worms and mollusks. The foods these fish eat are rather small, compared to the large size many sturgeon reach, requiring that foraging take up most of their time.
In the mid 1900’s farmers told an Ohio icythologist that their grandfathers had regularly seen sturgeons spawning in tributaries of Lake Erie before 1880. Spawning occurred in late May and early June, usually during corn planting time, and these farmers carried hand-forged spears with them into the fields while they planted their corn. When a farmer heard a sturgeon splashing on a nearby riffle (shallow area), they would run to the stream and use their spear to capture it. The farmers reported that the sturgeon were from 4 to 6 feet long, and provided a great deal of food for their families.
Lake Sturgeon
Activities
History Tells Tales
Objectives: Get a sense how past experiences may have relevance today
Materials: Materials: paper and pencil
This is an opportunity for your students to talk with relatives or friends about “stories” from their past. Almost everyone knows someone in their distant past – a grandparent, great uncle or elderly neighbor - that has talked about some distant event in their life that was memorable. Although these memories may not seem important at the time, they may actually help us better understand our world in ways we couldn’t have anticipated.
Scientists can learn much from the stories and experiences of people living in early America and it’s sometimes quite surprising what kinds of information can be extracted from stories passed on through the years. As one example you may want to share with your students, during the late 1800’s, a young girl in eastern New York State recorded the number of turns necessary for her to draw water from a well at her home. Each day she used a winch to draw water from a well and recorded the number of turns (as the water level rose and fell in the well, the distance from the ground surface to water level would change) in a notebook. Although it probably seemed of no practical importance to anyone at the time, it has turned out to be a wonderful record of the rise and fall of the water table in that part of New York during those years. Scientists can now look at these records and extract information that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.
What kind of stories/experiences might your students share?
1. Have your students ask if their caregivers have heard a story, first hand, from a parent, grandparent or friend about an early memory from their life. The object here is not to come up with something exciting but preferably something rather routine.
2. Have your students write this story down on paper as accurately as they can so they can share with the class
3. Once the students bring the information back to class, have them read the various remembrances and discuss what kinds of information about people, places, and things they might be able to learn from their stories.
Key Concepts
Environmental Issues, Identification, Populations and Ecosystems
Questions
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Posted by Scott Janes on December 08, 2005 at 11:30 PM
Q: what does the sturgeon eat?
A: A look at a sturgeon's mouth will give you a clue how it eats for sure. Sturgeon have a down-turned mouth that allows them to pick up food from the bottom. They find crustaceans (like crayfish) insects, worms, and even fish to eat on or near the bottom and kind of suck them up. Their barbels help them actually detect the food before grabbing it.