Figure 1.
Gulf Sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi).
Photo: Joe Hightower.
Table 1.
Sturgeons (Family Acipenseridae) of the world, their marine distributions, and their respective IUCN* Category.
Figure 2.
Documented distribution of Gulf Sturgeon in North America, determined from acoustic and archival telemetry projects.
The orange asterisks mark the easternmost and westernmost locations of confirmed detections of acoustic-tagged Gulf Sturgeon. Gulf Sturgeon spawn in coastal rivers including the eight shown on this map. Spawning and non-spawning Gulf Sturgeon typically remain in coastal rivers until fall and occupy estuarine and nearshore marine waters during winter. Yellow triangles indicate winter concentration areas for Gulf Sturgeon from two or more river systems. The 100 m isobath is shown as the light blue areas near the coast.
Figure 3.
Documented distribution of Green Sturgeon in North America, determined from acoustic telemetry project with fixed receiver array.
The orange asterisks mark the northernmost and southernmost locations of confirmed detections of acoustic-tagged Green Sturgeon. Green Sturgeon spawn in California in the Sacramento and Klamath rivers, and in Oregon in the Rogue River (shown in blue). They spend summers in estuaries and bays in California, Oregon, and Washington, and utilize the coastal ocean between southern Alaska and Baja California, Mexico, generally remaining in water less than 100 m deep. Summer aggregation areas are shown as yellow triangles. The 100 m isobath is shown as the light blue areas near the coast.
Figure 4.
Illustration of the preferred location of PIT tag application on a juvenile White Sturgeon.
The PIT tag is injected just beneath the skin, about 1 cm behind the head plate, on the left side of the dorsal scute line. Photo: Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society.
Table 2.
Summary of recent sturgeon studies that utilized electronic tag technologies to acquire movement information, by species, electronic tag type, and tracking method.
Table 3.
Schematic of techniques used to study different aspects of the biology of sturgeons.