On the other side, a 30-year-old slackwater reservoir interrupts their reproductive journey, stopping evolution in its tracks.
Living fossils - some joke they may be more closely related to triceratops than trout, Montana's 500 or so sturgeon have come, finally, to the brink.
In recent years, the solution has been to capture enough brood stock, fill enough fishy sperm banks, so that we can grow fish in hatcheries that we can no longer grow in rivers.
Until Tuesday, that is, when a new plan was announced, a new way of operating the dams that have corked not just vast river systems, but also evolution itself.
“The Kootenai River white sturgeon is on the brink of extinction,” said Noah Greenwald, science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “This historic agreement helps give the sturgeon a shot at survival.”
The agreement was cobbled together by conservationists, state bureaucrats, Native American tribes and federal agencies, and it changes the way those dams operate - including Montana's own Libby Dam.
For centuries (that's the only way to measure these fish, which can live to be 100 years old) spring runoff ran fast and free, scouring the riverbottom and gouging channels of cobble. That's where the female sturgeon dropped her eggs.
But the dams plugged the runoff, and in the slow water behind the dams sediment dropped out of the water column and plugged the cobble with silt.
River fish, dependent on that timeless current to reproduce, were swept into the reservoirs and died there, without ever breeding again. In the three decades since Libby Dam was built, no sturgeon has spawned there. In recent times, the population has been sinking by nearly 10 percent every year.
On Sept. 6, 1994, the Kootenai River white sturgeon were listed as endangered.
And so out west of Montana, in Idaho's stretch of the Kootenai River, biologists planted a batch of sturgeon where the riverbed still is gravel, and fish still can spawn. Today, the species lives on about 170 miles of river, extending from Kootenai Falls (30 miles below the dam) to Cora Linn Dam in British Columbia.
Keeping that habitat habitable, however, has meant operating the upstream dams in a new way, namely one that mimics nature.
Trouble is, downstream states have their own endangered fish, and what's good for the sturgeon is not necessarily what's good for the salmon.
It comes to this: the downstream folk want water from the upstream folk to help their fish survive, and the upstream folk want to hold onto their water to help their fish survive.
This latest solution reflects that jurisdictional complexity - it's a settlement between the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, the state of Montana, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the hydropower generated by the region's federal dams.
The agreement calls for continuing, through 2009, the interim rules that govern Libby Dam operations. Both temperature and flow are carefully regulated under those rules, to reflect nature's seasonal changes.
If that proves not enough, the agreement calls for using the dam's spillway to provide the downstream flows sturgeon need.
And in the longterm, the Corps has agreed to consider modifying way Libby Dam draws water for release - some warm water from on top, some cold water from down deep - to better control downstream temperatures.
And finally, the agreement calls for a major habitat restoration program, to be developed and implemented by the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, with funding and support from federal fishery managers.
“The sturgeon are central to Kootenai culture,” said Kym Cooper, tribal vice chair, “and we have worked hard toward their recovery.”
If successful, the partners will have given new life to a species that already has enjoyed a tremendous run.
Sturgeon evolved before the days of jaws, and so have great suction tubes for mouths. They evolved before bones, and so have cartilaginous skeletons like sharks. They evolved before scales, and so are adorned with a body armor of razor-sharp plates, called skutes.
They evolved with big predators, and so grew big themselves - white sturgeon on the lower Columbia River can grow to 1,500 pounds, the weight of a bull bison. And they evolved in the murk and the dark of the depths, and so live by the nose - a sturgeon can detect protein in the water at parts per billion.
The fish are so long-lived that even the seemingly endless litigation that lead to the recent agreement - six full years of legal wrangling - is but a blink of their shining eyes.
The lawsuits pitted tribes and states and conservationists and federal biologists against each other, as upstream and downstream interests diverged.
“Montana will do all it can to protect our fish and people above and below Libby Dam,” said Bruce Measure, a Montana member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. The multi-state NPCC was created by Congress to help balance the needs of fish and wildlife against the need for affordable and reliable hydropower.
Tuesday's agreement, Measure said, will help both sturgeon and bull trout, species high on Montana's priority list in the ongoing negotiations.
And, hopefully, it will do so at little or no cost to downstream salmon and steelhead.
Rich Torquemada, acting supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Spokane, said he was “very pleased that all parties have been able to reach an agreement,” adding that the settlement means the stakeholders now “can move forward with our partners in the important work of recovering this critically endangered species.”
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