Sturgeon make a splash in Shawano

They’re called lake sturgeon, but last week, they were the kings and queens of the river.

The prehistoric-looking fish arrived along the shores of the Wolf River near New London and Shiocton April 25 for their annual spawning run, with many of those fish eventually working their way up to the dam in Shawano.

Several people showed up below the dam April 29 to get a close-up view of the fish.

The crowd included Joe Keuler and his daughters from Madison, as well as Joe’s father, Bill Keuler, who made the trip from Wild Rose.

Joe Keuler said his family has a connection to sturgeon.

“He’s been sturgeon fishing all his life,” he said as he pointed to Bill Keuler. “My cousin recently proposed to his girlfriend in a sturgeon shack.”

Joe Keuler said he enjoyed the opportunity to get close to the sturgeon. Several of them leaped out of the murky waters of the river, while others slapped their tails near the rocky shoreline.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “They’re magnificent fish. They’re very prehistoric, and the girls love science and dinosaurs. They’re happy to see them.”

“This is the first time I’ve been to Shawano,” Bill Keuler said. “Last year, I went to Shiocton. We saw the adult females, and I’ve never seen so many huge sturgeon. Back in my younger days, if you got a 100-pound sturgeon, wow. Now, the fish are bigger and there are more of them. There are fish in here that are probably more than 200 pounds.”

Big crowds also showed up to see the fish in Shiocton and New London, but no one was more excited than Margaret Stadig, the state Department of Natural Resources’ new sturgeon biologist.

She joined two crews of DNR employees and college students that began capturing fish April 26 at Bamboo Bend on Shiocton’s west side, just off state Highway 54.

“This is completely new to me and definitely very unique to Wisconsin,” Stadig said. “Where I’ve worked with sturgeon before, they spawn deep in the water column, so you can’t see them. There are no crowds because there’s nothing to see. The fact that they’re here, they’re on the rocks and you can see them is so unique to anywhere else I’ve ever been working with this type of fish.”

Stadig helped measure and weigh fish.

“It is better than I could have imagined,” she said. “I could have never imagined this number of fish this close to the surface and the public out here so excited.”

Sturgeon enter the Wolf River from Lake Winnebago each spring. The fish are able to swim nearly 100 miles upstream to Shawano. Others head up tributaries of the Wolf, such as the Little Wolf, Embarrass and Shioc rivers.

“They are just so different than any other fish species,” Stadig said. “You pull them out of the water and they instantly look like a shark, but they’re so different from sharks because they don’t have teeth and they’re gentle giants. They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs. You guys are so lucky to have a population that has been managed so well. You have such a robust population that allows for the harvest you have during spearing season.”

Stadig said she and her team were surprised to see large males early in the run, which can last for a few days to a week.

“What’s surprising us is that a lot of the very long, big fish we’re seeing are males,” she said. “Usually, the really big fish are females and this year, we’re seeing a lot of big males.”

Males spawn every two years, while females make the trip upstream from Wisconsin’s largest inland lake every four years.

“Because of that, there are more males in the system,” Stadig said. “Females spawn every four years, so we just don’t see them as frequently. For every one female we see, we’ll see three to five males.”

A lot of the fish crews netted in Shiocton had tags, which means they had been captured in previous years.

“It’s a little less than 50%, particularly yesterday, the first day we were here,” Stadig said. “We’re also seeing a lot of really big fish that we’ve never seen before. We measure them, we take sex and check for a tag. If they don’t have a tag, we give them a tag. If they do have a tag, we write it down. We use all of the information to get a population estimate.”

Stadig has worked with sturgeon in Michigan and Texas before accepting her new job earlier this year and admitted she wasn’t prepared from her first experience on the Wolf River.

“It blew me away,” she said. “I was just flabbergasted. I don’t think you can wipe the smile off my face right now.”

Bill Keuler shared Stadig’s excitement.

“This should be a celebration of what’s possible,” he said. “We’re very lucky to have this. This is the largest population of lake sturgeon in the world. It’s a world-class thing — something we should take some pride in.”