UGLY FISH WITH BIG LIPS FULL

They were “scholars, professors, lawyers and mediators,” Langston said, involved in ensuring good governance. The Ojibwe, who now live in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Ontario, Canada, named one of the clans the Sturgeon clan.

UGLY FISH WITH BIG LIPS FULL

The Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Great Lakes region moved around with the fish, which were a major food source.Īccording to Langston, sturgeon were so plentiful that the Potawatomi and Ojibwe tribes’ legends “tell of rivers so full of sturgeon that a person could walk across the water on the backs of the fish.”

Lake sturgeon migrate back to their birthplace to spawn. They have sucker-like mouths with fleshy lips - “little Dyson vacuum cleaners that have evolved to go sucking up the crustaceans and mollusks and crabs, and then they just kind of swallow them,” Langston said. Lake sturgeon typically grow seven to eight feet, weigh as much as 300 pounds and live up to 150 years. Roughly 150 million years ago, they settled into their current size, shape and physiology and haven’t changed their form much since. Their direct ancestors survived the Great Permian Extinction that killed nine out of every 10 species and soon became the dominant, big fish in every major river system in North America and Eurasia. Sturgeon evolved long before the dinosaurs. “They have some serious history,” said Langston, the Distinguished Professor of Environmental History at Michigan Technological University. Not bad for a fish mostly known for producing the eggs eaten as caviar.

Ugly fish with big lips