Minnesota DNR doubtful about stocking sturgeon into Lake Minnetonka

Minnetonka, Minn. — Founder of the Westonka Walleye Program, Johnny Range, has spent the past 12 years fundraising and annually stocking 8- to 13-inch walleyes in Lake Minnetonka.

At this point, the operation is a well-oiled machine that has garnered interest from Lake Minnetonka residents who have seen the positive effects his stocking efforts have had in parts of the lake.

However, as he plans to continue doing that work, he’s eyed another species for Lake Minnetonka, too – stocking lake sturgeon?

“That’s kind a cool story that I’m working towards – trying to convince the DNR to let me bring these dinosaurs back to the lake,” Range said.

Invigorated by an incident that happened in 2019, when a group of kids trapped a lake sturgeon in Edina’s Minnehaha Creek, an outflow from Lake Minnetonka, Range thought it might be possible to stock sturgeon in Minnetonka.

“Another guy has a video of where the Grays Bay dam is, of a giant sturgeon swimming. And he held his fishing pole over it (and) you can see the sturgeon is longer than the fishing pole,” Range said.

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On top of the occasional sighting in ’Tonka of the prehistoric species, Range has heard accounts from others who say they’ve seen sturgeon in Grays Bay on the east side of the lake.

While the thought to begin stocking lake sturgeon into one of the Twin Cities’ largest metro-area lakes is enticing to some given the thought that more are lurking, the DNR isn’t overly jazzed about the idea.

According to DNR officials, such an effort and location wouldn’t be suitable for a healthy or wise introduction of the species.

“We don’t see that there’s really any potential to establish a sort of self-sustaining population in Minnetonka because there’s not the spawning habitat that they need there,” said Brian Nerbonne, central region fisheries manager for the department.

To boil it down, the recipe that was used in the Red River to reintroduce sturgeon required a few ingredients: the knowledge that the species historically lived there and the ability to stock a genetic strain similar to the historic population.

Any effort to do the same in Lake Minnetonka would lack those elements and would likely require continual stocking to maintain a population in the lake, the DNR maintains.

To potentially move this idea forward, Range said he found a fish hatchery in Wisconsin that raises sturgeon. His vision would be to import some of those eggs and use his walleye farmers’ ponds to rear them for transplanting them into Minnetonka.

While there are lake sturgeon in the Mississippi River, which could be tied to Minnetonka genetically, there’s no active Mississippi River sturgeon rearing happening. So, if eggs were sought to deposit into Minnetonka, it would likely be a different genetic strain that could be damaging to the current ecosystem, according to Nerbonne.

“They would be from some other watershed because there’s no current culture happening for lake sturgeon on the Mississippi River because it’s got a very healthy population and doesn’t need stocking,” Nerbonne said. “… We don’t want to see mixing of those things because there sometimes can be unintended problems.”

Nerbonne suspects the few sightings of sturgeon in Minnetonka are a result of sturgeon getting caught upstream or by people thinking it’d be funny to place one in the lake. He heard about a sturgeon that was in Powderhorn Lake in Minneapolis for a few years but suspected it may have been alone.

“I’m pretty sure that there was not some kind of reproducing population there. … I think that somebody thought it was amusing to put this lake sturgeon in Powderhorn Lake,” Nerbonne said, adding that he suspects the same might have happened in Minnetonka.