06/10/2026
In 2012, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources crew working a spawning survey on the Wolf River near Shawano pulled a female lake sturgeon out of the water that was seven feet three inches long and weighed 240 pounds.
They ran a fin ray cross-section to estimate her age. The rings said 125 years. She had been swimming in the Lake Winnebago system since 1887.
They tagged her and put her back.
She was alive before Wisconsin had paved roads. She was born the year the first gasoline-powered car was built in Germany. She had been swimming in the same watershed through both world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of radio, television, the internet, and the smartphone. She predated powered flight by sixteen years. When she hatched from an egg on the bottom of the Wolf River, Grover Cleveland was president and the Statue of Liberty had been standing for less than a year.
By the time she was caught in 2012, she had survived eighty spearing seasons on the Lake Winnebago system. Every February since 1932, thousands of people have cut rectangular holes in the ice, lowered wooden decoys into the dark water, and waited with sharpened steel spears for a sturgeon to swim underneath them. In a good year, over a thousand fish are harvested. In the 2026 season, spearers took 779 sturgeon in the opening weekend alone. The 125-year-old female survived all of it because she was in the Wolf River on her spawning run when the spearing was happening on the lakes, or because she swam under ten thousand holes over eighty winters and nobody put a spear through her.
Lake sturgeon are not built like other fish. They have no scales. They have bony plates called scutes running along their backs and sides like riveted armor on a hull. They have a cartilaginous skeleton, closer to a shark's than a bass's. Four sensory barbels hang from the underside of the snout, dragging along the bottom to detect invertebrates buried in the mud. The mouth is on the underside of the head, protrusible, toothless, designed to vacuum prey off the substrate. A sturgeon feeding on the bottom of Lake Winnebago looks like a living fossil because it is one. The family Acipenseridae has existed for roughly 150 million years. Lake sturgeon were swimming in North American rivers before the Rocky Mountains existed.
The Winnebago system holds the largest self-sustaining lake sturgeon population in the world. Roughly 25,000 adult males and 15,000 adult females occupy the interconnected waters of Lake Winnebago, Lake Butte des Morts, Lake Winneconne, Lake Poygan, and the Wolf and Fox Rivers. The population exists because Wisconsin made a decision in 1915 that most states did not. It closed the sturgeon harvest statewide.
By 1915, commercial fishing had already destroyed lake sturgeon populations across most of the Great Lakes. Between 1879 and 1900, commercial operations pulled roughly four million pounds of sturgeon out of the Great Lakes annually. The fish were killed for their eggs, which were sold as caviar, and for their swim bladders, which produced isinglass used to clarify beer and wine. Some were simply stacked on the beach and burned because fishermen considered them a nuisance that damaged gill nets. By the early 1900s, sturgeon had collapsed across Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Superior. Most populations never recovered.
Wisconsin closed the harvest for seventeen years. In 1932, during the Depression, the state reopened a limited spearing season on the Winnebago system as an economic measure. People needed food. The sturgeon were there. The season has run every February since, managed with harvest caps set by DNR biologists based on population surveys conducted each spring at the spawning dams on the Wolf River. The same spawning survey that caught the 125-year-old female in 2012 has been running for decades. DNR crews wade into the river during the spring run, net the fish, measure them, take fin ray samples, tag them, and release them. The data goes into a population model that determines how many fish can be harvested the following winter without pushing the population below replacement.
The spearing tradition is older than most of the families who practice it. Ron Bruch, the retired DNR sturgeon biologist who managed the Winnebago population for decades, said some families have been spearing together for four generations. The season opens on the second Saturday of February. Thousands of ice shanties appear on the lake overnight. A flyover on opening day of the 2026 season counted 3,019 shanties. Inside each one, a group of family and friends sits around a rectangular hole cut in the ice, watching a hand-carved wooden decoy suspended in the dark green water below, holding a steel spear, waiting for a shadow to pass underneath that is older than anyone in the shanty.
Only about eight percent of license holders harvest a sturgeon in a given year. Most spend the entire sixteen-day season watching the hole and seeing nothing. The social and traditional aspects of the sport keep most people coming back, the DNR says. Each fish comes with a unique story that will be shared countless times over the hours and years that follow.
The 125-year-old female is still out there, as far as anyone knows. She was tagged and released in 2012. She was making her twenty-fifth spawning run when the DNR caught her. Female lake sturgeon spawn roughly every five years after reaching maturity at around twenty-five years old. If she is still alive in 2027, she will be 140 years old and may make her twenty-eighth spawning run up the Wolf River, past the dam at Shawano, onto the same gravel beds where she has been depositing eggs since before the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.
A fish that was born in 1887 is still swimming in a Wisconsin river while thirteen thousand people buy licenses every year to sit on the frozen lake above her and try to put a spear through something her species has been dodging since the Cretaceous.
Source: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources / WPR / Ice Fishing Magazine / Earthly Mission.
