Shadow Fish

Story by Hannah Nordhaus

Steve Rider pushes out toward the middle of the Alabama River in a flat-bottomed boat packed with fishing gear and a cooler full of nightcrawlers. It’s a warm spring morning, the air thick with the smell of new growth, the wide river moving so slowly that it seems not to move at all. Rider, a fisheries program coordinator with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, motors past lush green banks dense with sycamore and willow and kudzu vines. His colleague Bernie Kuhajda, an aquatic conservation biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute, perches on the gunwale, eyes on the shaded depths. They’re looking for a native fish that hasn’t been seen for nearly two decades, and if they catch an Alabama sturgeon (Scaphirynchus suttkusi), they’ll know in an instant. With its spiked back, tawny sides, and whisker-like barbels, it can be mistaken for nothing else. Once found in multiple rivers in Alabama and Mississippi, the species was listed as endangered 25 years ago—far too late. It is now one of the rarest fish in North America.

The last place anyone saw an Alabama sturgeon was this stretch of the Alabama River, whose waters flow southwest from tributaries in Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains, through the heart of Alabama, and out through the Mobile-Tensaw Delta into the Gulf of Mexico. The river runs nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) through one of the most biodiverse basins on Earth, making long, lazy oxbows on its journey through hardwood forests, past chalky bluffs, and across floodplains and cypress swamps. The watershed is home to over 150 species of fish, from sturgeon, shad, and paddlefish to suckers, walleyes, alligator gars, and darters, not to mention hundreds of species of crayfish, freshwater snails, and mussels.

Few places in North America boast such a profusion of aquatic and terrestrial species, and nowhere has seen such dramatic loss—roughly half the country’s aquatic extinctions over the past century have taken place in this watershed. Rider’s work involves surveying and assessing the health of threatened “nongame” populations such as bowfin, paddlefish, and sturgeons that have relatively little or no commercial value. Kuhajda, an ichthyologist who studies rare freshwater fishes, advises on conservation efforts. And while there are plenty of threatened species here, none are quite as imperiled as the Alabama sturgeon. Which is why, each year for nearly two decades, Rider has been heading out to look for them.

Rider points the boat downriver and speeds up as Kuhajda scans the water, still in half-shadow. Even in sunlight, though, he doesn’t expect to spot a sturgeon. The fish, if there are any left, stay deep underwater, gliding along the river bottom as they feed on aquatic insects and small fishes. The men will only find the fish by pulling them up using nets or lines. Kuhajda and Rider are among the very few people alive who have seen Alabama sturgeon in the wild. Kuhajda is in his late 60s, but he still brims with the enthusiasm of a boy with a rod and pail of worms at even the faintest prospect of seeing one again. “They’re so cute,” he says, “with the barbels on their little nose that says, ‘Hi!’”

Here on the boat, the two men couldn’t seem more different: Kuhajda buoyant and gangly, with a head of windblown white hair dyed a pastel blue; Rider more measured and compact, his fair skin covered in sunscreen and a baseball cap. But both have spent their careers fighting to save an odd, bottom-feeding creature that few people know and fewer care about—one of the “hopeless fishes,” as Kuhajda calls these vanishing species.

We motor to an orange buoy that marks the location of a mesh gill net that Rider and his technician, Travis Powell, placed in the river the day before. But when Rider and Powell pull on the net, which hangs in the column of water to catch fish swimming past, it barely budges. They yank again, reorient the boat, and pull once more. Finally, the net comes up, packed with sodden leaves. There’s been rain in recent days, and Rider and Kuhajda suspect that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates hydroelectric dams upstream, has opened locks to release excess water and swamped the net with debris. Along with the leaves, there’s also one pale-yellow, footlong flathead catfish. They toss it back and move on to a gill net just downstream, where we find fewer leaves but no more fish. “This is kind of how our Alabama sturgeon sampling usually works out,” Rider says ruefully.

Still, he keeps looking. Each spring, Rider heads out on the river to search, using a very limited bucket of federal funds available to him through the Endangered Species Act. And each spring, he hopes that this will be the year he’ll pull one up. Much of the world has given up on the Alabama sturgeon, but Rider and Kuhajda have not. Nor have river advocates, who are trying to mend and restore a broken ecosystem to give Alabama sturgeon a chance—perhaps their only chance—of recovery. They hope it’s not too late.

Alabama sturgeon were once plentiful. In 1894, commercial fishermen hauled in about 19,000 of them from this watershed, harvesting the fish for meat and caviar—the small, salt-cured sturgeon eggs that had become fashionable among the world’s growing middle classes. But in the 1930s, catches began to dwindle.

This decline wasn’t unique to Alabama. Sturgeons are the most endangered group of fishes on the planet, with international conservation authorities assessing all 26 species as vulnerable or endangered. Seventeen are critically endangered, and several of those, including the Alabama sturgeon, are feared to be extinct in the wild, or very close. Worldwide, sturgeon populations have fallen a staggering 91 percent since the middle of the past century. The fishes are large, long-lived, and slow to mature (some take two decades to reach reproductive age), feeding as adults on the bottoms of oceans, lakes, and rivers, then migrating far upstream to spawn and lay their eggs, which hatch and drift downstream as they develop. Ancient fishes that evolve slowly, they’ve plied the waters of the Northern Hemisphere for more than 160 million years essentially unchanged, surviving climate swings, volcanic eruptions, and mass extinctions, even the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Humans, however, are another matter. Overfishing has been a major culprit in the worldwide decline of sturgeon. That’s especially true in Europe, where the most coveted caviars can sell for up to US $600 an ounce and the largest, egg-bearing beluga females, which can top out at more than 6 meters (20 feet) long, once commanded around $3 million on the black market. More fateful for the Alabama sturgeon, however, were two dams that went up across the Alabama River beginning in the 1960s. Both the Millers Ferry dam, on the upper river, and the Claiborne Lock and Dam were completed in 1970. The dams generated some hydropower, but they were mainly designed to ease navigation on the river, which was once an important artery, carrying cotton, wood—and, in the antebellum years, enslaved people—from the state’s timber and agricultural regions north of Montgomery to the Mobile Bay. Even as those dams were being built, though, railroads and interstate highways were coming in to replace them: “The world moved on,” says Mitchell Reid, Alabama state director of The Nature Conservancy. But the dams remained and made long-distance movement nearly impossible for the river’s fish species.

For Alabama sturgeon, the disruption was cataclysmic. Many spawned on the gravel shoals and bedrock of Alabama’s Cahaba River, a large tributary that meets the Alabama River upstream near the city of Selma. Now the sturgeon could no longer reach their spawning grounds to release eggs and sperm, nor could the larvae drift back down the river in the spring runoff. Riverine sturgeon larvae take time to develop into juvenile fish, typically drifting downstream dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers as they do; with the dams turning the river into a chain of stagnant reservoirs, there wasn’t enough free-flowing water left. Since dam construction began, only 39 Alabama sturgeon have been caught anywhere in the river system; by 1993, it had been nearly a decade since any scientist had seen an Alabama sturgeon.

That year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service convened hearings to consider listing the sturgeon as an endangered species. Immediately, state politicians and businesses formed a coalition to fight the listing, fearing that habitat protection measures would threaten industry and jobs along the Alabama and Tombigbee River, which merges with the Alabama downstream. The coalition argued that the fish was not distinct from the larger but similar-looking shovelnose sturgeon, common in the Mississippi River system 240 kilometers (150 miles) west. (Kuhajda was part of the team that had confirmed the Alabama sturgeon as a separate species in 1996, based not only on the fact that it had evolved in an entirely separate watershed, but because of its unusually large eyes and a snout that was, unlike that of the shovelnose, “smooth as a baby’s butt”.) And even if the Alabama sturgeon was its own species, opponents also argued that, regardless, it hadn’t been seen for so many years that it was too rare to list. “They said it was too endangered to be endangered,” Kuhajda huffs.

As with many recent endangered species fights—from spotted owls in timber country to sage grouse in the Wyoming oil fields—the fate of the animal itself was often lost in the bitter clash between politics and science. Busloads of protesters showed up to oppose the protections, brandishing “Don’t Endanger My Job” signs and enlisting speakers from across the political spectrum. “I’ll take our system of navigable waterways and the economic opportunity they represent over a bunch of ugly bottom-dwellers any day of the week,” said then-congressman Earl Hilliard, a Democrat, during one hearing.

There was barely anyone speaking for the sturgeon. Most of the state’s experts had served on a recent scientific panel, convened by the U.S. Department of the Interior, that concluded that the fish was indeed a distinct species, and opponents of the listing had successfully sued to bar their testimony, claiming the panel had been improperly convened. But Kuhajda hadn’t attended that earlier meeting, and he was still allowed to address the hearing. The room was packed with hundreds of people cheering each anti-sturgeon testimony. “It was like a revival meeting. Sixty-five people spoke against the listing and only one person spoke for it,” he recalls. “I said, ‘This fish is still out there. I’m sure of it. I fully support listing it as endangered.’”

The funding and attention that come with an endangered species listing, Kuhajda argued, would allow scientists to devote more resources to searching for the fish. If they looked, he believed they’d find it. If they found enough, they could start a captive-breeding program in federal facilities that had expertise and prior success in breeding, raising, and reintroducing sturgeons. But the crowd did not share Kuhajda’s enthusiasm. “When I finished you could hear a pin drop.”

Soon after those contentious meetings, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist pulled up the first Alabama sturgeon in nearly a decade. The fish was, clearly, not extinct. But the Fish and Wildlife Service still delayed a listing decision, ruling in 1994 that there was “insufficient information to justify listing a species that may no longer exist.” In 1995 and 1996, fishermen pulled up three more specimens. Faced with that evidence, the coalition of politicians and businesses agreed to fund a voluntary conservation program that sent out search teams, which netted five more sturgeon. In March of 1999, state scientists attempted to breed two of them in captivity at a state fish hatchery in Marion, which sits on a tributary near Selma. But while the female produced eggs, the male was not “running milt,” as fish sperm is called, and wasn’t ready to reproduce. “They had a bowl full of caviar and nothing to do with it,” Kuhajda says.

A month later, the female died from a bacterial infection likely caused by stress from the process used to make her spawn. The other captive sturgeon began to die off as well. The last female died in 2000—the same year that the federal government, facing lawsuits from conservation groups, finally listed the Alabama sturgeon as endangered. The last male, which his keepers had named Bubba, died in 2002 in his hatchery tank.

Then, in April 2007, Rider was surveying for paddlefish below the Claiborne dam when he pulled in a fish three-quarters of a meter (2.5 feet) long that he knew, from its serrated brownish-orange back and unusually large eyes, could only be an Alabama sturgeon. Rider pulled out his phone and called the state’s fisheries chief, Stan Cook. “Stan, I’ve got an Alabama sturgeon,” he said.

“Are you joking?” Cook replied.

“No. Stan, I’ve got an Alabama sturgeon,” Rider said. It was the first one collected in eight years.

He brought the fish to the Marion hatchery facility, calling in Kuhajda, who was then at the University of Alabama, to confirm the identification. At the hatchery, they placed the sturgeon upside down in a trough and made a small incision in its abdomen to inspect its reproductive tissues. Everyone had hoped it would be a female whose eggs they could inseminate with frozen sperm from the males captured in the 1990s. But this specimen was also male. At 71 centimeters (28 inches) in length, it was the second largest ever recorded (the largest, pulled up in 1953, was more than 78 centimeters (31 inches) long. And it was not in a reproductive state. No one knows how long Alabama sturgeon live—perhaps 15 to 20 years, maybe as many as 40. Given the fish’s advanced size, this one was probably too old to spawn—born, perhaps, before the dams. There was no point in keeping a fish that couldn’t reproduce. They placed a radio-transmitting device inside his abdomen and sewed him back up.

A few days later, they released him in the river. The fish stayed nearby for about six hours and then, over the next few days, swam nearly 60 kilometers (40 miles) downriver. He stayed in that lower stretch for most of the summer, moving more often at nighttime and early morning. It was a year of low water. “Most often he hung around areas that had springs,” seeking a cool refuge in the hot Alabama summer, Rider says. “For two summers in a row, he went to the same underwater tree limb and sat.” During springtime, when sturgeons normally spawn, “he’d make a run upriver to the dam looking for a girlfriend. I hope he found her.” After a year and a half, the tag’s battery stopped working. No one has caught an Alabama sturgeon since.

Rider did see one more: In 2009, soon after the tag blinked out, he was surveying for imperiled Alabama shad using an electrofishing system, which sends out an electrical charge to shock fish close to the boat, when one of his team members started screaming, “Sturgeon! Sturgeon! Sturgeon!” An Alabama sturgeon was floating at the surface with the other stunned fishes. But it recovered and darted away before they could net it. And then there was nothing. Not a capture; not a sighting.

“What if it had been listed earlier?” asks Kuhajda. Perhaps the eight fish caught in the 1990s would have then been sent to federal hatcheries with more experience raising sturgeon. Perhaps they would have bred them successfully, so that now, after 15 to 20 years, the hatchlings would have reached sexual maturity and reproduced in the river. They could have devoted more resources to habitat restoration, and a more hospitable river. “The fish existed then,” says Kuhajda, “and then everybody dragged their feet and argued the fine points of species identification until it was too late.”

The sun has climbed out of the shadows as Rider motors past overhanging walnuts and Spanish moss to check the trotlines—long fishing leads with multiple 2-foot-long, nightcrawler-baited lines hanging off. Great blue herons stand sentry on tangled green banks as we pass, and the water is so still that it’s hard to tell where the river ends and air and earth begin. This area of central Alabama is called the “black belt,” for its rich, dark soil, and for the slavery-stained plantations that once flanked the river. We float past the old cotton fields with their appalling history, past weeping trees and limestone bluffs, springs, and riprap, the cab of an old pickup truck poking out from a sandbar. At the first trotline, Rider and Powell pull up a channel catfish and a dark, humped smallmouth buffalo, both common in the river. They throw them back, then head to the next gill net, which yields another buffalo, but nothing else.

Despite the sturgeon’s absence in their nets, Rider and Kuhajda believe the fish are still concealed in the shadows and shallows. They have this faith, in part, because, beginning in 2014, Rider and his team collected jars of river water with Alexis Janosik, a marine biologist at the University of West Florida, who processed the samples in search of sturgeons’ “environmental DNA.” Sampling for eDNA, as it’s called, can identify genetic material in scales, skin, waste, gametes, and intestinal cells that have sloughed off in the environment, to confirm the presence of wildlife that might otherwise go undetected. “Fish forensics, if you will,” says Janosik.

Rider and Kuhajda had collected a small slice from the fin of the last sturgeon in 2007. Janosik used genetic sequences extracted from that “fin clip of gold,” as she calls it, to match potential genetic material in the river. The team collected water samples along more than 500 kilometers (300 miles) of river. The first time they looked, in 2014 and 2015, Janosik found Alabama sturgeon DNA in 18 different spots across the basin. When they sampled again in 2016 and 2017, she detected the DNA in 43 spots. This indicated not only that Alabama sturgeon were still in the river, but, because DNA breaks down after only 24 to 48 hours in water during warmer months, that they’d been there recently. As the technology evolved in the years since, Janosik performed higher-resolution analyses on those samples and was able to document the presence of multiple haplotypes—genetic variants—indicating the presence of several different individuals in the river. The results can’t tell the team how many fish are still alive. They can only confirm that, at the time the water samples were collected, multiple Alabama sturgeon were still swimming.

Before we check the last lines, we tie the boat to a tree upstream from a paper mill, the air thick with mill ash, pollen, and the acrid smell of pulped wood. Rider pulls out a jar of nightcrawlers from his cooler and we sit in the shade, baiting dozens of hooks for the trotlines he plans to leave overnight. “I’m in the twilight of my career. I’m only doing this another few years,” Rider says, as he plunges a large hook into a wriggling worm.

While eDNA provides heartening clues that the sturgeon hasn’t yet gone extinct, knowing fish are there isn’t enough. To save the species, conservation teams need live fish. “One Alabama sturgeon won’t do any good,” Kuhajda says. “We need a male and a female, and they need to be in the right reproductive stage.” Males spawn every two to three years, females every three to four, and scientists generally collect three to four males to breed with every female. “Is the Alabama sturgeon extinct?” Rider asks. “Probably not yet. Is it functionally extinct”—with too few alive to reproduce successfully? “I don’t know.”

We pull back out into the river and drop the lines near a gravel bar, then motor to another buoy. The men struggle to pull in the trotline, which has snagged on a rock or log. Rider maneuvers the boat to set it free. “I wonder if we’re dragging something,” he says.

They are: They’re dragging the weight of a vanishing world. He gestures toward the bluffed banks, the silent river, the hidden life and death underneath. “They’re still here, but there’s not enough. We’re 30 years too late.”

But if it’s too late for captive breeding, it may not be too late for other efforts. In 2021, conservation advocates conceived a project to “reconnect” the Alabama, linking the lower river to spawning grounds upstream. Working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, The Nature Conservancy proposed a canal system to ease the passage for Alabama sturgeon and 18 other species whose migration runs are blocked by the dams. The design would be a first, unique to the ecosystem. “Our fish are slow-moving, sweet-tea-drinking fish that take their time moving up the river,” says The Nature Conservancy’s Reid. The canals would, like the river itself, meander, bend, and riffle around the sides of the dams. “It’s the only remaining avenue for this natural life cycle to occur,” says Reid, and it’s the Alabama sturgeon’s best hope—“its only hope”—for recovery.  

Unlike 30 years ago, Alabama’s congressional delegation has come together to support the project. “It has been not only a bipartisan, but nonpartisan issue,” Reid says. But with an estimated $220 million price tag, it may take years to plan and build the fish passages. “We have to get it done quickly,” he adds. “We don’t know how long these species have.”

After two days on the Alabama, we drive to the Choctawhatchee River, in the southeast corner of the state. It’s the only entirely free-flowing waterway in Alabama, swirling and muddy, edged with limestone bluffs and tangled cypress roots. We push out onto the water as the morning mist begins to lift. A turkey vulture holds its wings out to dry along the sandy bank as Rider and Powell deploy a weighted net to drift along the bottom, where sturgeon feed.

There are no Alabama sturgeon in this river—there never were. We’re looking for Gulf sturgeon now: larger, oceangoing fish that also disappeared from the Alabama River after the dams went up. Populations are healthier here and in other rivers flowing into the Gulf, from Florida west to Louisiana. Around the same time that federal regulators postponed the Alabama sturgeon’s endangered decision, they listed the Gulf sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus desotoi) as threatened, allowing more robust protective measures to kick in. It worked. Today, says Rider, “we have a lot of sturgeons here.”

A few minutes later, the floats on Rider’s net begin to bob, then sink. “A big one!” Rider says, as he and Powell pull it in. “Oh, mama!” The sturgeon thrashes in the net for a few moments, then lies utterly still, as if playing dead.

The men ease the fish onto a sandbar, where they untangle it from the net and secure its tail to measure it and look for tags. It’s a female who hasn’t been tagged before—fat, nearly a meter around, and at just over 2 meters (7 feet) long, more than twice as long as even the biggest Alabama sturgeon. She’s an odd-looking creature, with her flattened snout and heart-shaped scutes, the bony, armored plates that march up her body like a parade of aspen leaves. She looks like some sort of inconceivable cross between an alligator, a handsaw, and an old TV Martian. “When you get a sturgeon in the net, all hell breaks loose,” Rider says. “But if you turn it upside down, it will go into a trance.” Other ancient, slow-evolving fish, like sharks and rays, are also “kind of chill,” Kuhajda adds. “More evolved fish are full of anxiety.”

Perhaps these ancient fish could have used more anxiety as the world evolved around them: as they blundered, placidly, into the dangling nets of the caviar boats; as dams rose in front of them; and as habitat contracted. Perhaps we all should have been more anxious about what we were doing to these strange and steadfast creatures. Alabama sturgeon don’t matter to most of us: They aren’t “ecosystem engineers,” shaping habitat for other species; there’s no argument suggesting that we need them to improve our lives or watersheds. They simply glide along the river bottoms as they have for hundreds of millions of years.

The Alabama sturgeon may be a shadow now, a mere suggestion of a species—“hopeless fish” that have left their very few champions doing “CPR on species that barely have heartbeats,” as Kuhajda says. But what is the alternative? “I don’t want to live in a planet of weeds,” he says, where only human-adapted organisms survive: catfish and kudzu, rats and raccoons. “I want a planet where you can go to unique places and find creatures you can’t find anywhere else”—those modest species that may matter little to the rest of us, but whose absence makes the world a lesser place. “You can stand by and watch something go extinct,” says Kuhajda, “or you can do something.” Who’s to say when it’s time to give up?

Perhaps it is too late for the Alabama sturgeon, and the world would be better off using limited conservation resources on species that are more likely to pull through. But the hard work and resolve of a few devoted champions have saved other animals once feared lost: the California condor, which dwindled to only 22 individuals before a captive-breeding program restored populations to the hundreds now in the wild, or the 14 Galapagos tortoises remaining on the island of Española, which were relocated in the 1960s and ’70s and bred in captivity. Now there are thousands. Perhaps we can act soon enough to reconnect the river around the dams. Perhaps those waters will flow again, and those ancient, sweet-tea-drinking fish will make their way back up the river, through meanders and riffles, to the gravel shoals where life begins.