Ongoing efforts to restore the lake sturgeon population in the Red River Basin will receive further impetus this fall with stocking efforts in northeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota.
The North Dakota Game and Fish Department released 1,000 lake sturgeon juveniles into the Pembina River on Monday, September 16. It was the second release in just a few years.
“From the sounds of it, they were very nice fish, some were around 11 inches long,” said Scott Gangl, director of fisheries management at Game and Fish in Bismarck.
During the first stocking operation on the Pembina River, Game and Fish teams stocked 1,000 lake sturgeon juveniles at three locations upstream of Walhalla, North Dakota, in September 2023. The stocking operations were conducted in advance of a project to convert an existing low-water dam on the Pembina River, near the mouth of the Red River in Pembina, North Dakota, into a rock rapids fish ladder.
The fish ladder would allow lake sturgeon and other species to move freely between the Red River and the Pembina River.
Similar to last year, Game and Fish worked with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to obtain sturgeon eggs from the Rainy River on the Minnesota-Ontario border. The sturgeon were then raised to fingerling size at the Valley City National Fish Hatchery.
On the Minnesota side of the basin, the DNR plans to stock several Red River tributaries with juvenile sturgeon by 2029, said Nick Kludt, DNR fisheries specialist for the Red River.
Like Gangl of the Game and Fisheries Department, Kludt said the average size of this year’s fry of sturgeon fingerlings was impressive. The Valley City National Fish Hatchery, he said, “has again raised absolute ‘tank’ fingerlings, which I am very pleased about.”
Deborah Rose / Minnesota DNR
Because of the excellent egg-pick survival rates to date, Kludt said the DNR plans to release lake sturgeon into four tributaries this fall. In early October, the DNR will release 2,500 sturgeon juveniles into the Otter Tail River, 1,000 into the Buffalo River, 3,500 into the Red Lake River and 1,000 into the Roseau River.
In a related report, the Minnesota DNR recently released a 30-minute documentary about the recovery of the sturgeon population in the Red River Basin called “Kings of the North: Lake Sturgeon Recovery in the Red River Basin.”
The video highlights the decades-long effort by the DNR and its partners to restore lake sturgeon populations along the Red River and its basin by stocking and removing or rebuilding low-water dams. The dams have been replaced with rock rapids fish ladders that still hold back water but allow fish to pass through, allowing sturgeon and other species to move freely in the basin.
“It’s a story about teamwork, innovation and perseverance in restoring an iconic Minnesota species,” Kludt said in a statement. “For anglers, conservationists, people interested in clean water, or the ‘young at heart’ who think swimming dinosaurs are pretty cool, this conservation story is for all Minnesotans.”
The 30-minute documentary is available on the DNR’s YouTube channel.
Success stories related to sturgeon recovery can be found throughout the basin. In 2022, the DNR documented lake sturgeon spawning in the upper Otter Tail River, a tributary of the Red River, for the first time in a century. In the Grand Forks area, anglers fishing the Red River reported a number of bycatches last spring and summer, including a 56-inch sturgeon caught and released by Andrea Charlebois of East Grand Forks during a women’s fishing competition in May.
