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It was spring and the river told her it was time. She left the warming waters of Long Island Sound, where she had spent most of the winter feeding on crustaceans and mollusks, and headed upstream. Struggling against the current, the compass of her own biology guided her along the same path her ancestors had traveled for thousands of years. She was determined to lay her eggs in the place where she was born. But something was different; something was blocking her way.
To human eyes, the scores of dams that divide New England’s great rivers aren’t particularly imposing. But to a shortnose sturgeon or Atlantic salmon, each dam represents a life or death challenge — a major roadblock to a natural cycle.
Those that manage to climb fish ladders often emerge battered and exhausted; those that do not miss an essential chance to spawn — a key reason that migratory fish, once abundant in the Connecticut River watershed, have declined significantly.
Living Fossils
Like its close relatives, the pallid sturgeon and Chinese sturgeon, the shortnose sturgeon looks the part of a living fossil — something between a stegosaurus and a catfish with long whiskers and armor-like plates flanking an olive-yellow body. Scientists believe these fish have survived for at least 70 million years—possibly twice that long. But they are now teetering on the edge of existence.
“Sturgeon species the world over face very similar threats,” explains Alison Bowden, director of the Conservancy’s freshwater program in Massachusetts. For the first time, scientists are looking not only at the extinction of a single species, but of an entire order — one of the oldest and most fascinating in the world.
Breaking Down Barriers
The sturgeon’s near disappearance from the Connecticut to the Penobscot to the Yangtze highlights a need for conservation across borders. On the Connecticut River, the Conservancy has contributed to the effort by surveying 3,600 culverts, dams and bridges across the entire watershed, with the goal of identifying structures that pose a significant threat to wildlife and prioritizing them for removal or repair.
“Since then, we’ve removed aging dams and improved culverts in the Eightmile and Westfield Rivers, two of the Connecticut’s most important tributaries,” says Bowden, who also helped develop criteria for new culverts that have been adopted by the Army Corps in all four Connecticut River states and two others.
And on Maine’s Penobscot River, where another population of shortnose resides, one power company, one Native American tribe, six environmental groups and numerous state and federal agencies and riverside communities have put in motion a plan to restore more than 1,000 miles of habitat — while increasing the total amount of power produced at the dams that will remain.
A Global Model
These partnerships are proving to be global examples for how collaboration can balance hydropower, river life and ecology for the benefit of people and nature.
On the great Yangtze River in China, for example, twelve new dams are planned for the river’s upper reaches. While these dams will provide energy for millions, they will have serious impacts on ecosystems and the fish supplies that sustain the very same families.
In a landmark project with the Three Gorges Project Development Corporation, the Conservancy will study ways of minimizing the ecological impact of several of the dams — an unprecedented opportunity to help integrate environmental standards into the development plans of one of Earth’s fastest growing nations.
The Conservancy’s track record of success working with partners like the Army Corps of Engineers in New England is helping to ensure that rivers around the world can continue to meet people’s needs. Restoring these connections will also help a fish that swam with the dinosaurs travel freely to spawn and to feed, fulfilling the mission hard-wired into its bony-plated body.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Jerry and Marcy Monkman (Sunrise on the Connecticut River in Turtle Cove Preserve, Essex, Connecticut); Photo © Photographer/Org (Shortnose sturgeon); Photo © Jerry A. Payne, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Bugwood.org (Shortnose sturgeon).
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