St. Clair River, ON

My name is Oana Birceanu, I’m a postdoctoral fellow at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo Ontario, Canada. I work on the Great Lakes, I specifically work on various fishes in Great Lakes tributaries and also from the Great Lakes. Lake trout, rainbow trout, white suckers, lake sturgeon are my favourite and I also work with sea lamprey.

My story is about a lake sturgeon. It’s actually a fairly recent one. In February 2018 I got a chance to go to a meeting about Lake Sturgeon on the St. Clair River. I was absolutely marked by how much love scientists were showing for that one particular fish. I never realized there was so much, I don’t what to call it, maybe a connection, to a fish that people had been developing and had been working for 20 some years to restore the population of these particular lake sturgeon in that particular river. To conduct a 20 year study and come back so many years later and realize that it’s working and the population is being rehabilitated and now they have a clean waterbody to thrive in, it was something really amazing to me.

I have not seen one in the wild, I do work with them pretty much every day so I get a chance to baby them, to raise them, take care of them believe it or not they’re a fish that likes to be pet, they’re very docile and it’s very hard not to fall in love with them.