Jurassic-Era Fish on Its Last finA Dinosaur of the Depths Faces Extinction Unless Missouri River Changes Are Made. Also endangeredSpring Rise on the Missouri?The Pallid sturgeonThe Natural MissouriToday’s Engineered River

By Henry J. Cordes

ON THE MISSOURI RIVER — Wildlife biologists use the term “charismatic megafauna” to describe animals such as pandas, kangaroos and whales, popular creatures that elicit public concern and support.

The pallid sturgeon will never fall into that class of critters.

It’s a fish, for starters, and an ugly one at that. With its pale color, bony scales and flat, spadelike head, the pallid is enough to make a channel catfish seem like Julia Roberts.

Herb Bollig of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledges that the pallid seems a creature that only a fisheries biologist could love. But he thinks the public would love the fish, too, if it got to know this ancient mariner of the Missouri.

Here is a marvel that was so perfectly adapted to its environment it has swum the Missouri River’s muddy waters since the time of dinosaurs.

With a keen sense for movement and a Hoover-like mouth, the old behemoth has trolled the murky river bottoms, sucking up aquatic insects and small fish.

“They’re so ugly, they’re beautiful,” Bollig said. “They’ve been around so long, they’re like a living dinosaur. It would be sad if they were to disappear.”

Despite its long history, the pallid sturgeon swims today at the brink of extinction.

The Jurassic-era fish is rarely caught in the wild, even when biologists sweep the Missouri bottom looking for it.

When fish are found, they are almost always 30, 40, even 50 years old — a sign the pallid long ago stopped reproducing in the wild. Pallids raised in hatcheries as a stopgap are the only young fish on the river today.

Scientists say the only way to ensure the pallid’s survival is to return the river to a more natural state, more as it was before it was dammed, straightened and walled in by man.

To that end, the Army Corps of Engineers proposes a man-made “spring rise” next year, raising dam releases in a small way in March and May to mimic the traditional impact of mountain and plains snowmelts.

Such flow-change proposals have been beaten back in the past by the hundreds of farmers in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri who work the still flood-prone land that was once the Missouri’s flood plain.

They say spring rises — even for just a few days, as proposed — could mean more water on their fields and money out of their pockets.

“It could be really devastating to farmers,” said Nancy Newlon, who farms along the river near Thurman, Iowa. “And there’s no scientific evidence this spring rise is going to help this endangered species.”

Scientists admit they’re not certain a spring rise would save the pallid; it’s an educated guess based on how pivotal ebb and flow have proven in big river ecology around the globe. But the fish’s position is so precarious, they say, it’s time to act.

In advance of public hearings on the corps’ plan Monday in Omaha and Nebraska City, The World-Herald offers this look at the controversial fish, its long past and uncertain future.

It’s a fish story dating back 150 million years — to a time when, the fossil record suggests, the pallid or a close cousin swam North American waters. It was a contemporary of dinosaurs and even looks a little like one, with a long, reptilian tail and outer bonelike plates.

The Missouri that the pallid evolved in was far different from the one flowing between Nebraska and Iowa today.

It was wide, meandering and muddier, with thousands of acres of shallow backwaters, side channels, islands and braided sandbars.

Each spring, waters from the thaw flooded the wooded bottomlands, washing in leaves and other material. It made the river’s waters a rich, organic stew teeming with fish and bug life.

The sturgeon was a king of the river’s diverse food chain. With four sensitive barbs above its mouth, it could sense movement within the blinding waters and sneak up on prey.

But while the fish survived the ice age, geologic turmoil and whatever cataclysm killed the dinosaurs, it has taken man only a half century to bring the sturgeon to the brink.

In the latter half of the 20th century, under orders from Congress, the Corps of Engineers built six major flood control dams on the Missouri.

The corps straightened and narrowed the river, timing dam releases to create a canal for barges from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis. The corps still manages the river for barges, although traffic is but a trickle of the original forecast.

Regardless of the benefits to man, few dispute that from an ecological standpoint, the changes have been a disaster. Even corps officials acknowledge they never would have designed the projects as they did had there been more environmental awareness at the time.

The projects eliminated more than 90 percent of riverside habitats used by birds, fish and other wildlife, much of it converted to farmland. Water flowing down the river is colder, carries less silt and lacks the seasonal ebb and flow that had been its natural heartbeat.

All river species suffered, with the overall fishery declining an estimated 95 percent. But it appears no fish suffered more than the pallid. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

At the time, the service estimated there were as few as 6,000 pallids left. More recent, scientific census efforts suggest even that figure may overstate the remaining wild fish.

In Montana, both above and below the first major corps dam on the Missouri and in its Yellowstone River tributary, is some of the best remaining sturgeon habitat.

Catching and tagging fish, then seeing how often tagged fish show up in later catches, gives biologists a good statistical population estimate.

Those studies determined that only 160 to 190 sturgeon are left there, nearly all decades-old graybeards. It’s estimated Montana sturgeon will be extinct within 20 years.

Population studies are incomplete south of the last dam in the system, Gavins Point near Yankton, S.D. Considering the length of that river stretch, some biologists think the fish may be more rare than in Montana.

As part of that research, four boats of Nebraska Game and Parks Commission biologists pushed into the river near DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge last week and spent the day checking their gill nets.

One of the first nets yielding dozens of blue suckers, gar and shovelnose also brought two young pallids, each about a foot long. “Twins,” joked Kirk Steffensen, leading the biologist team.

A quick electronic scan revealed the identity of one fish, which had been released from a hatchery about two years earlier with an ID chip embedded in its back.

The other had no chip. It was either a hatchery fish that had shed its ID tag or one of the rarest finds on the river: a young, wild-born pallid.

Possible, Steffensen said, but not likely.

In four years of sampling, the Game and Parks crews have netted more than 40,000 big river fish from Ponca, Neb., to the Kansas state line. Only 36 have been wild pallids, all old.

A tissue sample was snipped from the fin of the unidentified pallid for DNA testing that could confirm if it came from a hatchery. Then both young pallids were returned to the river.

Larry Hesse, a biologist from Crofton, Neb., who has made studying the Missouri River’s ecology and fishery his life’s work, said he has netted only a handful of wild pallids over three-plus decades.

From St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi, anecdotal evidence suggests the fish may be doing somewhat better, although population studies have yet to confirm that.

About the only place sturgeon are found in abundance is in Yankton, home of the U.S. Wildlife Service hatchery that Bollig manages. He has dedicated 14 years to perfecting the art of spawning pallids, even sacrificing a finger in a recent accident.

Bollig last week showed off five big sturgeon — including a 65- pounder — netted by the wildlife service in Montana. They’ll be the brood stock for the hatchery spawning class of 2006.

Since 1992, the hatchery has raised and released more than 62,000 sturgeon on the river.

It’s not known how many of those sturgeon still swim the river today. Regardless, wildlife officials say, such efforts should not be considered a long-term plan for survival of the fish.

“It’s an emergency room technique to maintain the species until we can fix the river,” said Mike Olson, Missouri River coordinator for the wildlife service.

Most scientific studies — including one two years ago by the National Academy of Sciences — have concluded “fixing the river” requires two things: restoring more of the lost backwaters and side channels through projects such as Tobacco Island near Plattsmouth and Hamburg Bend on the Iowa side; and dam releases that more closely emulate the river’s natural ebb and flow.

Because scientists have yet to determine why the pallid stopped reproducing, the spring rise may or may not help.

It could be that the lack of a spring rise deprives the sturgeon of a spawning cue. But a spring rise already occurs naturally south of Omaha, where the Platte and other tributaries empty into the Missouri, and that hasn’t seemed to help.

It also could be the fish are spawning, but that the young pallids aren’t reaching maturity. They could lack habitat, be deprived of a food source. Or maybe they’re being preyed upon by some bigger fish from which they could hide when the river’s waters were murkier.

It could also be pallids once migrated hundreds of miles to spawn but have been cut off from traditional spawning grounds by the dams.

“It’s probably a combination of things,” Bollig said.

Hesse, the longtime Nebraska biologist, thinks the pallid’s problems stem from scarcity at the bottom of the food chain. He thinks the corps and wildlife service are bowing too much to opponents by proposing a spring rise too small to wash much organic matter into the river.

“A lot of intelligent people are thinking in as shallow a manner as they possibly can,” Hesse said.

Criticized for a spring rise some say is unnecessary and others say is not enough, federal wildlife officials say river restoration efforts must start somewhere. Preparations are under way to study next spring’s proposed rise — including satellite monitoring of tagged fish — to see how pallids respond.

Federal officials are often asked why they go to all the time and effort to save a fish — one that even a wildlife service Web site calls “one of the ugliest fish in North America.”

The legal answer, Olson said, is because Americans have approved an endangered species law requiring intervention.

But ecologically speaking, he said, all species exist for a reason. He likened the pallid to that ugly fish in your aquarium that eats at the bottom and helps keep it clean.

“You have to have that ugly fish in there if your aquarium is going to be healthy,” Olson said. “When you start to lose a native river species like the sturgeon, it’s an indication our river system is not healthy.”

Also endangered There are two other endangered species on the Missouri: the interior least tern and the piping plover. The two shorebirds traditionally nested on river sandbars. The birds aren’t part of the debate over a spring rise because the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials agree the key to saving the birds is habitat restoration, not river flows.

Spring rise on the Missouri?

To aid the endangered pallid sturgeon, federal officials want to alter dam releases to, in a small way, mimic the surges of water that once washed down the Missouri River each spring.

2006 proposed pulses March 20 to 22 (increase from 20.7 cfs to 26 cfs) May 13 to 16 (increase from 22 cfs to 34 cfs)

The pallid sturgeon

Can live for more than half a century and grow to 80 pounds and 6 feet in length. Historical range over 3,500 miles in the Missouri and lower Mississippi Rivers, from the Montana Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. Endangered since 1990, illegal to catch; must be returned to river immediately. Sometimes confused with shovelnose sturgeon, a common fish that looks similar when young but grows only to a fraction of the pallid’s size.

The natural Missouri

The Missouri River of the late 1800s meandered over a riverbed several miles wide. High water from the spring thaw regularly cut new channels, backwaters and islands, creating diverse shallow- water habitat for wildlife. High water also flushed in leaves and other organic matter, providing food for aquatic insects and fish. The slow-moving waters carried a heavy load of sediment, helping fish like the pallid that hunted by feel in the murky water.

Today’s engineered river

The river has been channeled and straightened, and water is released from upriver dams to create a uniform depth to float barges. Old side channels and backwaters have been cut off from the river by levees, and much of the land and the former river flood plain are now farmed. Water released from the dams is also colder and carries less sediment.

SOURCES: Army Corps of Engineers, National Academy of Sciences.