The Great Lake Sturgeon

The St. Lawrence River Lake Sturgeon: Management in Quebec, 1940s–2000s

n 101 PIERRE DUMONT AND YVES MAILHOT The St. Lawrence River Lake Sturgeon: Management in Quebec, 1940s–2000s The lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) easily distinguishes itself from other fish in many aspects: its particular physical appearance, the time frame of its life cycle, and the historic importance, veneration, and respect given it by the First Nations. Another very distinctive characteristic is the similarity between the lake sturgeon’s and the human life cycle: contrary to the other fish species, whose life cycle is short or at least much shorter, the number of years needed to produce a generation is about the same for both, and 100-year-old specimens could still be fished or sampled some decades ago in the St. Lawrence River. Accordingly, acquiring the useful scientific knowledge and experience to define and support management is also a matter of generations, but in this case, of scientists. The first data-collecting period in the St. Lawrence River covered the 1940s to 1970s. In these years, studies were mainly descriptive of the biological characteristics and the movements of lake sturgeon. Commercial fishermen were still catching very large specimens, and few fishery management restrictions were implemented. Concerns about the sustainability of the fishery and habitat protection were expressed in the 1960s and 1970s. A second data-collecting period (1980s–2000s) was realized by a third generation of scientists and involved more precise and detailed population 102 n Pierre Dumont and Yves Mailhot dynamics studies, since an overexploitation diagnosis was confirmed in 1987, after an increase of fishing pressure (Dumont, Axelsen, et al. 1987). Restrictions were then applied to the sport and commercial fisheries but were not found sufficient to reverse the decline. In 2000, a stringent management plan designed to adapt the fishing catch to the natural production capacity of the downstream lake sturgeon population rapidly produced positive reactions in this sturgeon population, the only one in the lower part of the St. Lawrence system for which linear fluvial habitat integrity has nearly been maintained to the present. In Quebec, in the three other St. Lawrence system populations, Ottawa River, Lac Saint-François, and Lac des Deux Montagnes (plate 10), major constraints occurred (mostly habitat fragmentation and severe pollution episodes) that reduced very significantly the sturgeon production, as will be detailed further in this chapter. We will resume successively the most important information relative to the perception and use of lake sturgeon by First Nations and first European settlers, the two scientific data-collecting periods between the 1940s and the present and their respective management actions, and finally, conclude on the challenge created by the need to continue to collect scientific information in order to permit sound management decisions to maintain the production capacity for the future generations of sturgeon, man, fishers, and . . . scientists. Food and Spirituality for the First Nations It is not possible to find the origin of the interest of the different First Nations’ tribes in lake sturgeon, since no written documents exist from so long ago, but the first French explorers testified that they had a great interest in the fish. Historical use of lake sturgeon by First Nations has also been well documented by archeological observations in the Quebec distribution area. For example, according to Clermont, Chapdelaine, and Cinq-Mars 2003, the remains of 70 lake sturgeon found in Morrison Island and 105 specimens in Allumette Island, on the Ottawa River, strongly suggest that they were also important food items for Native people of the Laurentian Archaic period (6,100–5,500 bp). In the site of Pointe-du-Buisson, at the confluence of the St. Lawrence River in Lac Saint-Louis (plate 10), bone fragments of lake sturgeon, channel catfish, and catostomids, among the most fatty species of the St. Lawrence River fish community, consistently dominate in the remains of meal identified, associated with the Middle Late Woodland period (1,450–1,000 bp) (Courtemanche 2003). The Mohawk people of Kahnawake are still practicing subsistence fishery in Lachine rapids, near Montreal, at the outlet of Lac Saint-Louis. Management in Quebec n 103 Mélançon (1936) reports that sturgeon fishing is very ancient in Canada and that the First Nations fished with coarse nets during the wintertime and with harpoons in summer, and that they were catching large quantities in Trois-Rivières. He also noted that sturgeon was the...