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Sturgeon: The Great Lakes Buffalo
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
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n 1 DAVE DEMPSEY Sturgeon: The Great Lakes Buffalo The book of natural resource exploitation in the United States and Canada since European settlement contains multiple illustrations of a ravenous human hunger for fish and wildlife species that extinguished, or nearly so, that which it desired. Even the most casual student of conservation has heard the legend of the passenger pigeon. It goes like this: in the first half of the 1800s, unimaginable numbers of birds darken the sky as they pass overhead. After 50 years of unchecked market hunting followed by futile conservation work, the last passenger pigeon dies in a Cincinnati zoo in 1916. The passenger pigeon has plenty of company in the annals of catastrophic fish and wildlife consumption in North America. The most prominent example in the American imagination is the American bison, popularly known as the buffalo. Millions of bison ranged over millions of acres of the continent in the early 1800s. Desired primarily for their hides and meat, bison fell at the hands of market hunters by the millions for several consecutive decades. By the 1880s, they were rarely sighted anywhere in their native habitat. Managed enclosures and zoos were the bison’s remaining living space. The species’ monuments were stacks of skulls and piles of bones. 2 n Dave Dempsey Said Theodore Roosevelt in a work published before his presidency: “A merciless and terrible process of natural selection, in which the agents were rifle-bearing hunters, has left as the last survivors in a hopeless struggle for existence only the wariest of the bison and those gifted with the sharpest senses” (Roosevelt 1893, 28). The bison is a magnificent creature, capable of stunning speed, gifted with a noble head. Its association with the European settling of the American West lent it romance and won it a reprieve. Today the survival and recovery of the bison, even the sale of bison burgers in grocery stores and restaurants, comforts the public with its narrative of near-extinction and successful last-gasp conservation. Humans, the tale suggests, may not only rescue, but also even restore a part of nature’s plenty. Yet even in their fondness for the symbol of bison, Americans know little about them. Of 2,000 Americans who completed a Wildlife Conservation Society questionnaire in 2008, fewer than 10 percent knew how many bison remain in the United States, but 74 percent “believed that bison are extremely important living symbols of the American West.” The Society called the public “woefully out of touch with the species’ prospects for long-term survival” (Wildlife Conservation Society 2008). A hundred years ago, the bison was safely, if not abundantly preserved. But the ultimate fate of sturgeon in the Great Lakes was unknown. It lacked, as yet, a meaningful human constituency for protection. Victim of contempt and plunder in turn, the lake sturgeon was frighteningly vulnerable to extinction. Many regarded it as ugly. It was far from being an example of what is now known as charismatic megafauna—a classification embracing polar bears, grizzly bears, cougars, wolves, and great apes (Buckley 2009). But as we have learned, the lake sturgeon is every bit as appealing as these stars of the natural world in its own way, and just as much a barometer of health for the ecosystem it inhabits. It may be useful to trace the arc of human appreciation that begins in the late nineteenth century in the Great Lakes. Before that, the sturgeon of the Great Lakes was often considered a nuisance. Thought to consume spawn of valuable species, the sturgeon got in the way of catching whitefish and had few known commercial uses. Looking back decades later, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources argued with only slight hyperbole that “no single animal was ever subjected to such deliberate wanton destruction as the lake sturgeon. By the time it finally became recognized as a valuable fish, it had largely been destroyed as a troublesome nuisance” (Michigan Department of Natural Resources 1973, 51). Sturgeon incidentally caught in nets were destroyed. Sometimes they were stacked in rows, dried, and burned. Some were used as fuel for boat boilers. Others were served up as pig feed or used to fertilize soil. [44.212.26.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:35 GMT) The Great Lakes Buffalo n 3 But the sturgeon, it turned out, could serve humans tangibly. A Canadian fisheries commissioner lamented the only gradually growing esteem of his countrymen for the...