PERRY, Ga. — The Go Fish Education Center in Perry, operated by The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division, holds many fish, which includes a species that dates back to the age of the dinosaurs, the lake sturgeon.
The original native population of lake sturgeon fish in the Coosa River system in Northwest Georgia became locally extinct around 1960.
Jonathan Savarese, hatchery manager at the center, helps feed and grow the lake sturgeon fish. He works at 1 out of 2 Georgia DNR state hatcheries that raise them.
"Midsummer, we'll get a round of sturgeon, about 8,000 2-inch fish. We'll work with them throughout the year, so we have a round that we keep for five months," says Savarese.
The center in Perry will keep a couple hundred to grow even bigger.
"We'll hold those for a little over a year," says Savarese.
"Larger fish tend to survive better. The center in Perry is really important to our program because they're growing the larger fish for us, and we can't grow them in our larger facility," says John Damer with The Wildlife Resources Division of Georgia DNR.
Damer adds they're stocking more of these fish, some bigger than others, back into rivers of the Coosa system.
"We stocked close to 400,000 of these little guys. The biggest goal really is to bring them back as a sport fish. They get really big. They fight hard and fight like a shark," says Damer.
The wildlife resources division with DNR continues to monitor the lake sturgeon population once they are back in the wild. They use nets, baited trotlines and electro-fishing to check the population from time to time. Right now, it is not legal to harvest them yet. If you catch one, DNR says you should handle it as carefully as possible and gently return it to where you caught it.