photo credit: Courtesy of CDFW
Now-retired CDFW environmental scientist Mike
Harris holding a white sturgeon
for a moment, before returning it
to the waters of Suisun Bay.

Plummeting numbers of white sturgeon in California is prompting state environmental regulators to issue emergency regulations.

Those regulations close key spawning spots to sturgeon fishing. They also set a catch limit of one per year, change the size limit and ban boats from having more than two sturgeon aboard.

The California Fish and Game Commission passed the emergency measure this week, and the CDFW said the new regs go effect at the end of October or beginning of November, “following approval by the Office of Administrative Law.”

Primarily a freshwater fish, sturgeon also dwell in estuaries, including San Francisco and San Pablo Bays, and occasionally visit near-shore ocean waters. 

Sturgeon can live more than a century. Historic records show them growing larger than 25-feet in length, before intensive fishing consumed their abundance. 

Most wild sturgeon today in California waters are less than 20 years old. That's actually a huge problem as the fish can't successfully reproduce until reaching at least 10 years of age, and only spawn every two to four years.

Recent red tides in San Francisco Bay also claimed large numbers of the fish.

Over the past quarter century, the number of harvestable sturgeon in California has decreased by nearly 85 percent, according to CDFW.