A prehistoric armored fish that some scientists hope to transplant to the St. Marys River could be named an endangered species.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing to put that designation on Atlantic sturgeon bred in four areas, including the Southeastern coast.
That could affect how tightly government agencies manage water quality in some rivers, but only if those areas are labeled "critical habitat" for the sturgeon, one environmental activist said.
"Having an endangered species in the river helps me do my job to protect [the waterway]," Altamaha Riverkeeper Sonja Cox said. Her organization advocates for the health of that river, which enters the ocean near Brunswick, Ga.
"If the species is listed as endangered, it puts in place legal hurdles to polluters," Cox said.
The service won't start to identify critical habitat unless the fish are declared endangered or threatened.
It's not clear yet whether calling sturgeon endangered would affect the St. Marys project, said Heath Rauschenberger, an ecologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Jacksonville. He said his agency is talking to the fisheries service about issues affecting sturgeon, but is far from any decisions about whether to try populating the St. Marys.
Sturgeon are born in freshwater rivers and spawn there, but in between spend most of their lives in the ocean.
Atlantic sturgeon can be 14 feet long and weigh up to 800 pounds, and can be a dramatic and even dangerous presence in rivers because of their tendency to jump out of water, sometimes into the path of boats.
Atlantic sturgeon don't spawn in the St. Johns River, but a protective rule the fisheries service drafted last month says young sturgeon born elsewhere were recorded using the St. Johns as a nursery in the 1970s and '80s.
The agency said more than 60 percent of the possible sturgeon habitat around the St. Johns was blocked by construction of the Rodman dam, which controls water entering the river from the Ocklawaha River.
Similar travel by sturgeon into the St. Marys has prompted researchers to study whether the small, dark river on the Florida-Georgia border could be seeded with a sturgeon population that would spawn there. That would likely create an instinctive pull for their offspring to return there for spawning.
River populations of sturgeon in Florida, Georgia and part of South Carolina represent about 1 percent of the number that would have lived there in the 1890s, the fisheries service concluded.
With close to 350 fish spawning yearly, the Altamaha is apparently better territory for sturgeons. Still, that represents just 6 percent of its historic levels, the agency said.
"That's just vastly wiped out," Cox said.
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