This sturgeon was caught in Maryland’s Nanticoke River in 2006, near the river's confluence with Marshyhope Creek.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologists Mike Porta (left) and Matt Baldwin weigh a sturgeon they caught in Marshyhope Creek in 2014.  

A buoy marks the spot of an acoustical sensor that detects spawning sturgeon in Maryland's Marshyhope Creek.

Researcher Dave Secor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science launches an acoustical sensor in hopes of detecting sturgeon in Maryland’s Marshyhope Creek. 

Fishery biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources search Marshyhope Creek for spawning sturgeon. 

Biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources pull gill nets on Marshyhope Creek in hopes of finding sturgeon. 

If you’re trying to catch a living dinosaur, you’d better use a big net.

In this case, that would be a net long enough to stretch nearly the entire 400-foot width of Marshyhope Creek. Even then, you’re likely to come up empty.

This sturgeon was caught in Maryland’s Nanticoke River in 2006, near the river's confluence with Marshyhope Creek.

“There aren’t many up here,” said Matt Baldwin, a fisheries biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. He and his small team of researchers on a late-September morning had just finished unfurling four nets across the creek at intervals several hundred yards apart. “So, it’s exciting when we catch one.”

For several years, Baldwin and other scientists operated largely in obscurity, their tedium broken only by the occasional appearance of an Atlantic sturgeon in their nets. Then came a Norwegian company’s proposal in 2020 to build a $300 million indoor salmon farm that would discharge millions of gallons of wastewater into the Marshyhope.

Suddenly, those scientists found themselves at the center of an increasingly pitched battle over the future of the waterway on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Some chose to wade in.

They warned state regulators and officials in the town of Federalsburg that the fish factory could wipe out the small population of sturgeon in the Marshyhope. And if those fish were lost, so too would be the state’s only suspected breeding population of the ancient — and federally endangered — fish species.

Concerned neighbors and environmentalists took up the message themselves. Then, it found its way into an Oct. 14 press release from AquaCon, the plant’s would-be developer: “Public comments … drew attention to Atlantic sturgeons’ use of Marshyhope Creek, which warrants further consideration and evaluation.”

In the same announcement, AquaCon said it was pulling its request for a state discharge permit, effectively shelving the massive project until further notice.

It remains unclear if the company will resurrect its Federalsburg plans or pour its energy instead into one or two separate locations it has been pursuing elsewhere on the Shore, both outside the Marshyhope’s drainage area.

AquaCon’s proposal may have been destined for the wrong place at the wrong time. If it had materialized a decade or so earlier, the project almost certainly would have faced fewer obstacles.

But once a strange-looking fish leapt into a fisherman’s boat, everything changed.

Atlantic sturgeon co-existed with dinosaurs and still bear a passing resemblance. Instead of scales, their backs are covered in bony plates called scutes. They are the largest fish native to the Chesapeake Bay, growing to as long as a Volkswagen Beetle (about 14 feet) and weighing nearly as much as a horse (about 800 pounds).

The bony fish species once abounded in the Bay, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But its population plummeted from overfishing, loss of habitat and worsening water quality, experts say. By the late 1990s, researchers began publishing scientific epitaphs of the Chesapeake population, declaring it to be “functionally extirpated.”

A buoy marks the spot of an acoustical sensor that detects spawning sturgeon in Maryland's Marshyhope Creek.

One of those researchers was Dave Secor. “Clearly, I was wrong about that,” said Secor, a longtime scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “Thankfully.”

Sightings began cropping up across the Bay watershed. In the Marshyhope, a 40-mile-long tributary of the Nanticoke River that traverses the Maryland-Delaware border, reports of sturgeon leaping into the air were on the upswing. But concrete proof didn’t arrive until one jumped into a small fishing boat, and its occupants, a pair of retired U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists, managed to snap a photograph.

“We would have never known about it,” said Chuck Stence, a Maryland DNR fisheries biologist.

Despite recent sightings, the Baywide estimated sturgeon population remains at a fraction of its historic size. The overall East Coast population of sturgeon, ranging from Canada to Florida, has struggled to recover, and the National Marine Fisheries Service declared it an endangered species in 2012.

By then, researchers on the Western Shore of the Bay had confirmed the presence of a breeding population in Virginia’s James River. Another was verified later in the Pamunkey River.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologists Mike Porta (left) and Matt Baldwin weigh a sturgeon they caught in Marshyhope Creek in 2014.  

But could the Marshyhope and Nanticoke also be locations where sturgeon reproduce? That’s one of the main questions that Secor, Stence and several other researchers have been trying to answer for nearly the past decade.

All indications point to yes. In 2014, Stence led a crew in the Marshyhope that hauled out two sturgeon — in the same net — that were “ripe,” or ready to spawn.

But conclusive proof of spawning would require finding “young of year” fish in the river, Secor said.

Scientists are inching closer to that evidence. In September, a fisheries biologist with the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife captured a juvenile sturgeon in the Nanticoke River just upstream of Seaford in that state. It was the first young sturgeon caught by scientists in the Nanticoke-Marshyhope system.

Its presence in the Nanticoke is an encouraging sign that sturgeon are breeding there, Stence said. That’s because young sturgeon spend between a few months to two years in their native waters. So, a place where one is found is likely to be the waterway where it grew up. They are anadromous fish, meaning that, after their juvenile years, they spend most of their lives in salty seas, returning to their native rivers only to breed.

Genetic sampling will be needed to pin down whether the young Delaware fish, believed to be 1 or 2 years old, is part of the local population of sturgeon and not from another group in the Chesapeake, Stence said.

One of the biggest challenges that scientists face with saving the Atlantic sturgeon is the species’ drawn-out spawning habits. They take a long time by fish standards to reach sexual maturity — about 10 years for males and nearly 20 years for females. And they can hold out for up to five years between spawning sessions.

Even then, the conditions must be just right. Water temperatures must be 55–79 degrees Fahrenheit. The water can’t be too salty or fresh. There must be plenty of oxygen, ruling out many streams plagued by oxygen-starved “dead zones.”

Researcher Dave Secor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science launches an acoustical sensor in hopes of detecting sturgeon in Maryland’s Marshyhope Creek. 

Perhaps most importantly, the waterway’s bottom material must be firm — candidates include cobble, hard clay or bedrock — so the fertilized eggs can stick to something instead of floating away. The Marshyhope’s bottom is almost ideally suited to host a sturgeon nursery, Secor said.

“If you go to other systems, you won’t find this level of gravel,” he said.

The landscape along the creek also helps ensure its effectiveness as spawning habitat. There are a few small towns along its length, interspersed by corn and soybean fields. But much of its shoreline remains covered with forests, reducing the amount of silt that might wash into the creek and smother the bottom, Secor said.

He and his fellow scientists have thrown the scientific kitchen sink at understanding the Marshyhope’s sturgeon. They have deployed egg mats on the river bottom in the hope of capturing eggs or larvae, but those efforts so far have failed. They also have used sonar to map the most suitable potential habitat on the bottom.

But the centerpiece of their efforts involves the long nets used by Baldwin and others. During the August-October spawning season, research boats since 2014 have routinely patrolled the Marshyhope. The Nanticoke has been sampled since 2015.

A team will hoist one end of a 100-yard-long net out of the water and hand-pull the glistening mesh across the deck of their boat until reaching the opposite end. Success is rare. From 2015 to 2018, they averaged six catches of new fish per year and four recaptures between both waterways, despite spending hundreds of hours on the water.

Fishery biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources search Marshyhope Creek for spawning sturgeon. 

But if they are lucky enough to land a sturgeon, the real work begins. A quick bit of surgery leaves each fish with an acoustic transmitter in its belly. Its pings enable researchers to track their movements from a phalanx of underwater receivers in both waterways.

That work allowed researchers to estimate the size of the system’s population adult sturgeon. At 29 individuals, it was dangerously low, Secor said.

“When you get to 50 and lower, your chances of extinction go up,” he said. “They really are on the edge of vulnerability.”

In Secor’s eyes, the AquaCon fish factory put the survival of that slim assemblage at risk. The company’s permit, which had garnered tentative approval from the Maryland Department of the Environment, would have allowed the release of up to 2.3 million gallons a day of treated “purge” water into the Marshyhope.

Secor and other opponents’ primary sticking point was that the discharged water would contain large amounts of a bacteria-derived substance called geosmin, which they argued could upend the fragile aquatic ecosystem.

At an MDE-hosted community meeting in August, Secor publicly vented his concerns. He also penned a caustic guest commentary for The Baltimore Sun.

Stence, for his part, made no secret of his opposition. Days before AquaCon yanked the permit, he told the Bay Journal that he shared others’ concerns that the proposed facility’s chilly discharges would lower the creek’s ambient water temperature, potentially disrupting the sturgeons’ spawning schedule. “In our mind that could create a thermal barrier,” he said. “The [creek’s] water just can’t absorb that much cold water.”

Yonathan Zohar, director of the Aquaculture Research Center at the University System of Maryland’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology and an adviser to the company, said he recommended that AquaCon drop pursuit of the site because of the potential risks to sturgeon — and they agreed.

Even if the salmon factory proposal never resurfaces, another threat remains, Secor said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s seasonal rules, which set minimum dissolved oxygen levels to protect migratory and spawning fish around the Bay, apply to the wrong season for its sturgeon, Secor said.

The protections run Feb. 1–May 31. But the Nanticoke-Marshyhope telemetry research shows that, unlike other East Coast anadromous fish species — which spawn in the spring — sturgeon in the Nanticoke system spawn in the late summer and early fall. The same is true for sturgeon in the James and Pamunkey rivers.

Biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources pull gill nets on Marshyhope Creek in hopes of finding sturgeon. 

Secor said that he has been pressing officials for years to expand the regulations into those months. Doing so is likely to draw opposition from the landowners who would have to comply with the more-stringent standards. But it’s worth trying, as he sees it, to boost the sturgeon’s chances of remaining in the creek.

“They are the most sensitive fish in the Chesapeake Bay for water quality,” he said. “It’s the world’s smallest Atlantic sturgeon population and exists really on a knife’s edge of vulnerability.”

Meanwhile, back on the water that fall morning, Baldwin was not having any luck netting a sturgeon. It turns out that a big net only gets you so far. Catching a sturgeon also takes patience.

“They’re out here,” Baldwin said after another fruitless examination of a gill net. “We just have to be at the right place at the right time.”

Jeremy Cox is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Maryland. You can reach him at jcox@bayjournal.com.

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