James O'Reilly

A woman from St. Louis booked a single day of fishing in Canada, her first time ever on that river, and pulled up a fish her guides think is more than 100 years old. It's over 11 feet long, and it'll never make the record books. In British Columbia it's illegal to lift a sturgeon that size out of the water, so nobody can put it on a scale. The official world record is a 468-pounder from 1983. This one got sized up with a tape measure instead. Sixty inches around the middle, run through a length-and-girth formula, comes out to roughly 1,100 to 1,200 pounds. It had also never been caught or tagged before, so it spent its whole life in a busy fishing river without anybody landing it. If the age guess is right, it hatched into a river that had just been gutted. In 1897 the Fraser gave up about 1.1 million pounds of sturgeon. By 1905 the catch was down to around 44,000. The canneries were after caviar, so the big females went first, with some of the roe shipped to Russia of all places. Problem is, a Fraser female doesn't spawn until she's about 26, and after that only every 4 to 10 years. Every egg-heavy fish they pulled was a quarter century of growing the river couldn't replace. First Nations fishermen warned the cannery owners it would crash, and by 1905 it had. That fish then made it through decades of commercial nets until B.C. banned keeping sturgeon in 1994. A female that hatched the year of the ban would've only hit her first spawn around 2020. Funny thing is, nobody can actually prove the age. You age a sturgeon by slicing a fin ray and counting rings like a tree stump, and when USGS researchers tested that on fish whose real ages were known, the readers' consensus matched only about 31% of the time, and got worse the older the fish was. So "over 100" is an educated guess on a fish nobody had ever measured. Sturgeon outlasted the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and Fraser River caviar almost got them in eight years.