(gentle music) - [Speaker] Look, there it goes.

All right.

(kids speaking indistinctly) - It's alive!

(upbeat music) - [Amy] This is year 16 of the Milwaukee River Lake Sturgeon Rehabilitation Program.

- [Speaker 2] Here we go, Mr. Sturgeon.

- And the whole objective is to restore a population of lake sturgeon to their native waters in the Milwaukee River.

- Just as you have a child grow up and leave home, this is what these fish are meant to do.

It's very rewarding to know that they've managed to make it through this growing up period and that they have a good chance of making it out there in the lake.

- The eggs are actually harvested from the Wolf River.

And then we bring them here to our rearing facility where they imprint on Milwaukee River water.

So the water coming into this trailer is actually from our Milwaukee River.

And the idea is they imprint on that water so that when they're released into Lake Michigan, they will eventually come back to the Milwaukee River.

(water bubbling) - So we usually start out with close to 2,000 fish.

The DNR comes in, they do pit tags.

They're just like the little rice pieces that the cats and dogs are gonna get.

And then when they come through the fish passageways, there's a scanner in there.

And it'll automatically pick up their numbers, scan it, and then we know what year that fish was put into the river, where it came from.

- Lake sturgeon were extirpated from the Milwaukee River back around 1890.

And that happened to all of the sturgeon in most of the rivers that lead into The Great Lakes.

And not just The Great Lakes, but worldwide.

There was this idea that there were no end of sturgeon and that you could just keep harvesting, and they would always be there.

Well, eventually they hit the elastic limit of sturgeon and basically wiped the population out of the Milwaukee River.

So here in Wisconsin, we're lucky in that we're one of the 20 states that lake sturgeon are found in.

And Wisconsin is the only state where they're not on the endangered or threatened species list.

They are on the watch list.

- [Amy] It's so important because the lake sturgeon are an absolutely magnificent creature.

They are the largest fish in The Great Lakes.

They are evolutionarily an ancient creature.

They can grow up to six feet long and live over a hundred years.

- We'll place them into the water so it can begin its journey.

And may you watch that journey over the years.

(crowd cheering) - Yay!

- Unfortunately, with their population being decimated for a long, long time, seeing a sturgeon in the Milwaukee River became an impossibility.

We're hoping to reverse that, erase that and get it back to the way that it should be.

(upbeat music) - I wanna name him Bob.

- Actually, this is the 16th year of the project.

It's a 25 year project.

Because we won't know if the females will start coming back until they're 25 years old.

The big hope is that, in fact we have, you know a viable population of lake sturgeon, you know, by the time we're done so that we increase the population of lake sturgeon in The Great Lakes.

(upbeat music) (gentle music)