240-pound sturgeon caught in Detroit River among biggest ever recorded in US

How's this for a big fish story?

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crew caught a 240-pound sturgeon last week. It is 6-foot-10, with a girth of nearly 4 feet. It is a native — and threatened — species to Michigan, and one of the largest lake sturgeon ever caught in the United States.

"We're trying to protect this fishery," said Justin Chiotti, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. "Everybody is always catching a huge sturgeon. Everybody catches a 100-pounder. But a fish this size, is very, very rare to catch."

More than that, it also shows how much business, climate change and the destruction of habitats have affected natural wildlife over the years, and why the federal agency is trying to save the species.

This fish was caught by a crew in a boat near Grosse Ile.

The crew of three — two women and a man all in their 30s — measured and tagged the fish, a female, with a chip similar to what people put in their pets. So if anyone ever caught it again in the next 100 years, they'd know it was the same one.

And then they released it.

They also took a photo of it, which, any fisher knows, is essential.

'Big fish! Big fish!'

Within minutes, the photo posted to social media Friday started going viral.

What is less known, however, is the story of how it was caught.

The three scientists — Paige Wigren, Jennifer Johnson and Jason Fischer — were on the Detroit River last Thursday, and had been fishing for a while, they said. They had five lines in the water.

Until then, they had only managed to catch a 5-gallon bucket.

The first three lines came up empty, but then, just before noon, Fischer, who was the newest to the crew, said he felt something on the line, a slight tug — and maybe, he said aloud, it was a fish.

Johnson was driving the 26-foot-long boat.

Wigren was handling the hooks. 

"The fish started to surface," Wigren said, recounting the story. "Jason said, 'There's a fish coming up,' and Jenny looked over, and she said, 'Big fish! Big fish!' I moved to the back of the boat, grabbed the net."

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Johnson added that when she looked into the water, the fish's shadow was so huge, she just thought, "Oh my God."

After five or six minutes and a few failed attempts to net the fish, they finally got it.

"It took all three of us to heave her over the side of the boat," Wigren said, adding that all three of them weren't sure they'd be able to land the fish. "And just for reference, the largest fish Jenny and I have seen was 123 pounds."

Normally, they'd all take a photo holding the fish. But this one was so big, that they laid it down in the boat, and snapped an image with the 5-foot-6 Johnson lying next to it so anyone who sees it can immediately understand the scale of it.

A fish this big ...

The scientists estimate that the fish hatched in the Detroit River sometime in the 1920s, when Detroit was the fourth-largest city in America. But, they added, that's a conservative guess. It likely is even older.

"We don't know the exact age of the fish," Chiotti said. "But, to be 7-foot long and 240 pounds, the fish was likely 100 years old or older, and I think that's a minimum estimate, but I didn't want to get too crazy."

It also, the experts said, was probably in the Detroit River to spawn.

The largest specimen on record, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, weighed 310 pounds.

Chiotti said that a couple centuries ago, sturgeon were so common, with more than a million of them in the Great Lakes region, that they were considered nuisance fish and would be discarded from fishing nets.

At some point, folks figured out these fish tasted good, and their eggs did, too.

And commercial fisheries began harvesting them. In this case, over-harvesting them.

In addition, sturgeon, like salmon, need fast-running water to reproduce, and as waterways got dammed and their habitats disturbed, they have died off. In Ontario, the fish are even considered endangered.

On top of that, poor water quality from pollution also reduced the population.

Now, Chiotti said, there are only about 30,000 of them, including an estimated 6,500 swimming around in the Detroit River system, and the fishing survey helps provide vital scientific data to protect and hopefully restore fish populations.

"It was the catch of a lifetime," Wigren said in the Free Press interview, with the other two scientists on the boat with her that day. "I don't know what else will happen in my career to top this."

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.