The Slice
Rearing Sturgeon for the St. Louis River
9/9/2026 | 1m 56sVideo has Closed Captions
Find out how the Great Lakes Aquarium is teaming up with...
Find out how the Great Lakes Aquarium is teaming up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fond du Lac Resource Management, and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to reestablish a self-sustaining population of sturgeon in the St. Louis River.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
The Slice is a local public television program presented by PBS North
The Slice
Rearing Sturgeon for the St. Louis River
9/9/2026 | 1m 56sVideo has Closed Captions
Find out how the Great Lakes Aquarium is teaming up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fond du Lac Resource Management, and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to reestablish a self-sustaining population of sturgeon in the St. Louis River.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Where to Watch The Slice
The Slice is available to stream on pbs.org and the PBS app.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipSo this project is really special to all of us here.
I'm Miranda Rinne, and I'm the curator of aquatics at Great Lakes Aquarium.
Of course the aquarium, if it's known for anything, it's probably our sturgeon touch pool.
And so when we talked about what we could do, and we found out from the DNR that we could help with lake sturgeon rearing, we were all in.
Unfortunately, the industry in the area, the paper mills, the logging industry, a lot of pollution went into the Saint Louis River.
And so the sturgeon were almost completely wiped out back in the 50s.
Sturgeon were stocked into the river, in the 80s.
And those are the sturgeon that you find today.
What we're doing now is for, Fish and Wildlife and Minnesota DNR and the Fond du Lac Band kind of honed in on, looking to represent the sturgeon population with a more accurate genetic profile.
U.S.
Fish and Wildlife have been raising lake sturgeon at the Genoa National Fish Hatchery in Wisconsin for many years.
And we base our, standard operating procedures off of their protocols here.
We received eggs from the spawn and hatched them here, and we're raising them on the Saint Louis River water here.
So there is evidence that shows that the sturgeon, will cue to the water that they're raised in, especially the first 45 days of life is really important for that imprinting process.
And that just gives that extra assurance that they're going to know how to get back to the Saint Louis, to spawn, A total of 3500 fish, is the eventual goal to get to each year.
My primary driver for working at an aquarium is the conservation aspect of it.
So for me, this is a dream come true.
to be able to work on this project.
The Slice from PBS North.
Support for PBS provided by:
The Slice is a local public television program presented by PBS North