Lake Sturgeon Stocking Program Continues

Friday, October 25, 2024 | 10:17am

Agency biologists gathered this fall at the Cumberland River Aquatic Center to prepare juvenile lake sturgeon for release into Tennessee waters.

These small prehistoric-looking fish have a series of bony plates called scutes, rather than scales, covering their back. Biologists remove a scute from each fish to indicate the year the Agency’s Lake Sturgeon Stocking Program Continues the fish was stocked. A sub-group was tagged to gather information about movement, growth, and survival.  

Once the work was completed the sturgeon were loaded onto trucks for their destination. At Watts Bar Reservoir,1,800 were released into the Tennessee River and 2,400 were released into the Cumberland River at Old Hickory Lake.  

“The end goal of the project is to re-establish a self-sustaining population of lake sturgeon in the State of Tennessee,” said TWRA River and Streams Program Coordinator, Brandon Simcox.

Since 2000, more than 300,000 lake sturgeon have been stocked into the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. The sturgeon is a primitive fish, once abundant in Tennessee, that can grow up to 8-feet long, weigh up to 300 pounds and a possible 150-year life span.   

Currently sturgeon is listed as endangered in the state due to population declines over the last century related to overfishing, habitat loss, and the damming of rivers. The last lake sturgeon documented in Tennessee prior to the restoration project was in the 1970s.  

“The lake sturgeon released this year will take nearly 20 years before they are old enough to begin reproducing, ” Brandon said. “After 24 years, we are just now getting to the point that we may begin to see lake sturgeon spawning for the first time in Tennessee in over 50 years.”  

Although fishing for lake sturgeon is not allowed and they must be released if caught, TWRA encourages anglers to report pertinent information from incidental catches, such as time, location of capture, and fish length of the lake sturgeon. 

Learn More About Lake Sturgeon in Tennessee