A five-foot sturgeon turned up dead aboard a sailboat moored off Bristol Harbor this week, and nobody can yet explain how the fish ended up on the deck of a boat moored near the Herreshoff Marine Museum. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management says personnel who collected the fish saw no obvious signs of trauma, leaving the circumstances of its death, and its arrival on the vessel, a mystery.
The discovery, reported by WJAR, has prompted the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to team up with NOAA Fisheries to assess the sturgeon over the coming days, with findings to be shared once the review is complete. The agency says it works closely with NOAA Fisheries' sturgeon recovery program, which routinely collects information from dead and salvaged sturgeon as part of a broader effort to track sturgeon along the Atlantic coast. That national effort, known as the Sturgeon Salvage Program, coordinates with state partners to collect biological data, tissue samples, and check for acoustic tags on recovered specimens, according to NOAA Fisheries.
A Sturgeon in Bristol Harbor
Atlantic sturgeon encounters in Narragansett Bay are historically uncommon. State trawl surveys recorded just two sturgeon in Rhode Island waters between 1997 and 2006, a scarcity tied to historical overfishing that severely depleted local populations, according to a 2007 status review from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That rarity helps explain the scientific interest in this particular specimen, found moored just off a landmark with its own storied past on the water.
The sailboat was tied up near the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol Harbor.
Why Sturgeon Are Federally and State Protected
More broadly, NOAA Fisheries listed five distinct population segments of Atlantic sturgeon under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2012.
Rhode Island regulations separately bar the harvest, landing, or possession of Atlantic sturgeon in state marine waters year-round, meaning possessing the fish is illegal regardless of how it was acquired, under state rules cited by Law.Cornell.Edu. Rhode Island Environmental Police actively patrol Narragansett Bay and have a track record of issuing criminal summonses and civil citations for illegal possession of protected marine species.
What Officials Still Don't Know
Atlantic sturgeon can grow up to 14 feet and live as long as 60 years, according to NOAA Fisheries. NOAA lists vessel strikes, incidental entanglement in commercial fishing gear, and habitat degradation along the coast among threats to sturgeon.
The sailboat's owner found the fish in the cockpit and contacted DEM. How the fish got aboard the sailboat remains unknown.
Members of the public who come across stranded or dead sturgeon are asked to report the find at (401) 423-1923. The species' slow road to recovery underscores the stakes of every such report: a coastwide commercial harvest moratorium is in place.
