The Bay’s white sturgeon—huge, slow-to-reproduce “living fossils” that have hardly changed over their approximately 200 million years on Earth—are now facing such peril that the state of California has closed fishing for them under emergency regulations while it considers listing them as a threatened species.

White sturgeon lurk in the murky bottom of San Francisco Bay and the Delta, stealthily making their way upriver to spawn and slurping up clams. Of San Francisco Bay’s two sturgeon species, white sturgeon are the homebodies (in contrast to anadromous green sturgeon, which spend much of their lives at sea). But adult white sturgeon numbers have been in decline for two decades, says UC Davis fish biologist Andrea Schreier. 

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Source: Bay Nature