The lake sturgeon is a North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

n temperate freshwater

Fresh Water

Fresh Water is the debut album by Australian rock and blues singer Alison McCallum, released in 1972. Rare for an Australian artist at the time, it came in a gatefold sleeve...

 fish

Fish

Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...

, one of about 20 species of sturgeon

Sturgeon

Sturgeon is the common name used for some 26 species of fish in the family Acipenseridae, including the genera Acipenser, Huso, Scaphirhynchus and Pseudoscaphirhynchus. The term includes over 20 species commonly referred to as sturgeon and several closely related species that have distinct common...

. Like other sturgeons, this species is an evolutionarily ancient bottomfeeder with a partly cartilaginous

Cartilage

Cartilage is a flexible connective tissue found in many areas in the bodies of humans and other animals, including the joints between bones, the rib cage, the ear, the nose, the elbow, the knee, the ankle, the bronchial tubes and the intervertebral discs...

 skeleton and skin bearing rows of bony plates. The fish uses its elongated, spadelike snout to stir up the sand

Sand

Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal...

 and silt

Silt

Silt is granular material of a size somewhere between sand and clay whose mineral origin is quartz and feldspar. Silt may occur as a soil or as suspended sediment in a surface water body...

 on the beds of river

River

A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including...

s and lake

Lake

A lake is a body of relatively still fresh or salt water of considerable size, localized in a basin, that is surrounded by land. Lakes are inland and not part of the ocean and therefore are distinct from lagoons, and are larger and deeper than ponds. Lakes can be contrasted with rivers or streams,...

s while feeding. Barbel

Barbel (anatomy)

A barbel on a fish is a slender, whiskerlike tactile organ near the mouth. Fish that have barbels include the catfish, the carp, the goatfish, sturgeon, the zebrafish and some species of shark...

s surrounding the mouth, usually four, are purely a sensory organ to help it find its food. The lake sturgeon can grow to a mass of over 190 kilograms (396 lb) and a length of over 3 meters (9 ft) over its long lifetime. It can reach well over 100 years of age and usually does not reach sexual maturity until its third decade of life.

The lake sturgeon has taste buds on and around its barbels near its rubbery, prehensile lip

Lip

Lips are a visible body part at the mouth of humans and many animals. Lips are soft, movable, and serve as the opening for food intake and in the articulation of sound and speech...

s. It extends its lips to vacuum up soft live food which it swallows whole due to its lack of teeth. Its diet

Diet (nutrition)

In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...

 consist

Piscivore

A piscivore is a carnivorous animal which eats primarily fish. Piscivory was the diet of early tetrapods , insectivory came next, then in time reptiles added herbivory....

s of insect

Insect

Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

 larva

Larva

A larva is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle...

e, worm

Worm

The term worm refers to an obsolete taxon used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, and stems from the Old English word wyrm. Currently it is used to describe many different distantly-related animals that typically have a long cylindrical...

s (including leeches), small fish and other small, primarily metazoan organism

Organism

In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...

s it find

Predation

In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator feeds on its prey . Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of its prey and the eventual absorption of the prey's tissue through consumption...

s in the mud

Bottom feeder

Demersal fish live on or near the bottom of the sea or lakes. They occupy the sea floors and lake beds, which usually consist of mud, sand, gravel or rocks. In coastal waters they are found on or near the continental shelf, and in deep waters they are found on or near the continental slope or along...

.

This sturgeon is a source of caviar

Caviar

Caviar, sometimes called black caviar, is a luxury delicacy, consisting of processed, salted, non-fertilized sturgeon roe. The roe can be "fresh" or pasteurized, the latter having much less culinary and economic value....

 and isinglass

Isinglass

Isinglass is a substance obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish. It is a form of collagen used mainly for the clarification of wine and beer. It can also be cooked into a paste for specialized gluing purposes....

 and its oil was once used to fuel steamboat

Steamboat

A steamboat or steamship, sometimes called a steamer, is a ship in which the primary method of propulsion is steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels...

s. It is also a valuable gourmet food fish. Like most sturgeons, the lake sturgeon is rare now, and is protected in many areas. It has been overharvested for its various products, and has succumbed to pollution and loss of migratory waterways. It is vulnerable to population declines through overfishing due to its extremely slow reproductive cycle; most individuals caught before twenty years of age have never bred and females spawn only once every four or five years. The specific harvesting of breeding females for their roe

Roe

Roe or hard roe is the fully ripe internal egg masses in the ovaries, or the released external egg masses of fish and certain marine animals, such as shrimp, scallop and sea urchins...

 is also damaging to population size. The lake sturgeon was once a very abundant species in the Great Lakes

Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are a collection of freshwater lakes located in northeastern North America, on the Canada – United States border. Consisting of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, they form the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total surface, coming in second by volume...

, so common it was caught and discarded by fishermen seeking other species, but now it is rarely seen. Few individuals ever reach the extreme old age or large size that those of previous generations often did.

Today, limited sturgeon fishing seasons are permitted in only a few areas including some locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Fishing for sturgeon is allowed on Black Lake

Black Lake (Michigan)

Black Lake is located in Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties in Northern Michigan. With a surface area of 10,130 acres , it is the seventh largest inland lake in Michigan. The largest body of water in the Black River watershed, it drains through the Lower Black and Cheboygan Rivers into Lake Huron...

 in Michigan, for example, but the fishery is limited to five total fish taken each year, each over 36 inches (914.4 mm) and taken through the ice with spears.

Anglers in Minnesota have the opportunity to harvest one lake sturgeon per calendar year between 45 and 50 inches on the Rainy River and Lake of the Woods

Lake of the Woods

Lake of the Woods is a lake occupying parts of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba and the U.S. state of Minnesota. It separates a small land area of Minnesota from the rest of the United States. The Northwest Angle and the town of Angle Township can only be reached from the rest of...

 on the Canadian border. The early season runs from April 24 to May 7 each year with the late season running from July 1 to September 30. Anglers must have a valid Minnesota fishing license and purchase a sturgeon tag to harvest a lake sturgeon.

There is also an annual sturgeon spearing season on Lake Winnebago

Lake Winnebago

Lake Winnebago is a freshwater lake in eastern Wisconsin, United States. It is the largest lake entirely within the state.-Statistics:...

in Wisconsin. It has changed from a 16 day season in the past to a season with a marked quota, however, the season can still run for the full 16 days. If 90–99% of the quota is reached on any day the season is over at 12:30 pm the following day. If 100% (or more) of the quota is reached the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources can enable an emergency stoppage rule. The largest sturgeon ever harvested on Lake Winnebago weighed 212.2 pounds, measured 84.2 inches in length and was speared by Ron Grishaber in 2010.

The sturgeon is also present in Québec in St-Lawrence river, where it is targetted by commercial fisheries. It is also a game fish with an harvest limit of 1 per day. It is probably the only place where it is fairly common to catch one.