7′ Long White Sturgeon Carcass Found at Lake Shasta; Could Predate Shasta Dam

I’ve seen estimates that suggest when the Shasta Dam was completed in the 1940s, it plugged up better than 80% of the state’s prime salmon & steelhead spawning habitat.

(I also suspect the steelhead caught behind the dam – in a faint reprise of their former lives – still run up Upper Sacramento River in the winter.)

Still, if you’re like me, you get all weirdly nostalgic for the pre-dam days when you hear that a bass fisherman found a dead, 7′ Sturgeon floating in Shasta lake, and that biologists suggest the fish might actually predate Shasta Dam:

Huge sturgeon carcass surfaces at Lake Shasta : Redding Record Searchlight

Randy Benthin, senior fisheries biologist for the Department of Fish and Game in Redding, said the fish Frost handled was a white sturgeon.

The beast was at least 20 years old, but it could have predated Shasta Dam.

Benthin said for a brief time, two decades back, the lake was stocked with hatchery-raised sturgeon.

When the planting program was discontinued, it was the last time new sturgeon entered the lake.

Sturgeon have lived in the lake’s inlets since before Shasta Dam was finished in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

But white sturgeon, which can live more than 100 years and grow to well over 1,000 pounds, have been unable to spawn in the lake since the mid-1960s when powerhouses erected on the Pit River cut them off from their spawning grounds, Benthin said.

Shasta Dam is here to stay – as are the Pit River powerhouses that prevent sturgeon from spawning (and the McCloud Reservoir Dam, which effectively extincted the McCloud’s Bull Trout) – but every once in a while, I’d like to believe something from the pre-dam era still survives.

It’s a wholly romantic notion, though one that apparently finds purchase with more than a few of us (why else would the biologist even suggest the possiblity?).

It’s probably why tourists clogs the road in Yellowstone every year when the last remnants of North America’s enormous bison herds wander too close to the road; it’s a living connection to a time when the continent truly was a wild place, free of fences, freeways and “No Trespassing” signs.

shasta lake, white sturgeon