Reason for optimism on sturgeon in James

When I asked Matt Balazik about the gill nets he uses to catch prehistoric fish in the James River, he explained in his typically enthusiastic way about water temperatures and dissolved oxygen and how the ancient beasts he's spent years trying to net and study can't stay entangled too long -- two hours at most.

Balazik, a fish biologist working on his Ph.D. at VCU, has the kind of passion for his subject that is infectious. But his voice trailed off contemplating the idea that one of his nets could be responsible for the death of even one example of this giant and rare species.

"I don't know what I'd do if we killed one," he said, staring out across the river toward Hopewell.

I joined Balazik, fellow VCU grad student Pete Sturke, brother Martin Balazik and Lower James River keeper Chuck Frederickson last week in search of Atlantic sturgeon -- specifically, the genetically unique James River variety.

The Atlantic sturgeon is an amazing fish in ways too numerous to relate in full here. It's older than the dinosaurs, entering the fossil record about 120 million years. It's the largest (a recent catch topped out at more than 300 pounds) and longest-lived fish (the Atlantic variety is documented to live more than 60 years) in the James.

The sturgeon feeds by skimming the river bottom, sucking up mud and silt, excreting that and digesting the macro invertebrates it Hoovers up in the bargain.

Oh, and instead of scales, it wears a suit of armor.

"It's got the barbels of a catfish, the tail of a shark, a mouth unlike any other and it's armor-plated," said Balazik, who has a sturgeon tattoo on his right forearm.

Frederickson echoed the feeling of wonder: "It's just a neat fish."

But despite surviving the past 120 million years, sturgeon populations up and down the East Coast have been decimated in the past 125 by human action. Starting in the late 1800s, overfishing on rivers such as the James, Hudson and Delaware culled huge numbers. More recently, pollution and sediment runoff have wreaked havoc with the species' ability to spawn.

In the James, however, recent events portend a more hopeful future for our most primeval of fish.

A couple of weeks ago, Balazik caught a 9-foot, 300-pound female between City Point in Hopewell and Turkey Island. He said a female hadn't been caught this far up the James in decades, and it suggests she was on her way upriver to spawn. That theory is supported by the number of male fish full of milt (sperm) they've caught in recent weeks, including the 5-foot, 54-pounder they snagged while I was there.

Conventional wisdom says anadromous fish, such as shad and striped bass, live most of their lives in the ocean, then return to the rivers of their birth every spring to spawn. All the evidence Balazik has amassed, however, suggests James River sturgeon spawn in the fall.

Related to those spawning efforts is the second bit of recent good news for James River sturgeon. The James River Association, part of the Virginia Sturgeon Restoration Team, a group of organizations working to help restore the sturgeon population in the James, recently received a $50,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Federation to construct two artificial spawning reefs in the river.

Sturgeon need a rocky substrate to lay their eggs on, Frederickson explained, something not common in the James after years of human management of the river and sediment deposition. So the 70-foot by 150-foot reefs off of Appomattox Manor and Presquile National Wildlife Refuge will be constructed of granite boulders and gravel.

The reef building is part of the larger effort undertaken by the groups in the Virginia Sturgeon Restoration Team, groups such as the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not to mention VCU and the JRA. The effort has many goals because there still is so much to learn about this fish: How many James River-strain sturgeon are there? How often do they spawn? What time of year do they spawn? What do they do and where do they go in between spawns?

"Their life history is more complicated than anadromous striped bass or American shad. We pretty much understand how those species work," said Greg Garman, Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at VCU. "We don't know how long [sturgeon] are resident in the James. There's still an awful lot we don't understand about their comings and goings. You can't restore or manage a species if you don't understand its basic biology and ecological role."

That's why Balazik and others are out here. They're all scientists trying to learn more about a fish once populous enough to be credited with saving the Jamestown colonists from starvation but now a candidate for federal listing as a threatened species. But from Balazik's reaction to the thought of accidentally killing just one, it seems there's more to it than that.

Maybe it's the wonder at the idea that something so old still lives among us. I'm not sure. Whatever it is -- history, appearance, size -- for the first time in more than a century, the sturgeon of the James River finally have some humans on their side.