They've been around since plants made coal. Now they contribute to the creel. They grow like a pig, and by some accounts smoked paddlefish – the other, other white meat – is better than pork cutlets. These Jurassic survivors are living through another age, one pocked by reservoirs behind lofty dams and pollution and excessive harvest.

Paddlefish are wonderful oddities of nature. Their jaw is the only bone in their body. Their “paddle,” fully one third of their body, is super-charged with nerves to sense their only prey, microscopic plankton. They feed by swimming with their over-sized mouth agape, filtering out of the water these finely sized foods. Paddlefish are indeed relicts from the primal past, the kind of past you might see conceptualized in a natural history museum fresco. You know the type: a misty view, foreign-looking ferns and conifers that tower over otter-tailed reptiles that must have made quite a splash lumbering through the water. Not depicted though in the waters waded by the long-extinct dinosaurs, are paddlefish. They swam there then.

What's most remarkable is a good many wobbly trips around the sun later, and they swim American waters still, that is, waters of the Gulf Coast, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River basins. In this current geologic period, paddlefish took a marked decline, particularly in the middle 20th century. As reservoir building increased, paddlefish numbers decreased. What reservoirs created in habitat for largemouth bass, walleye, yellow perch and the likes, they ruined for paddlefish reproduction.

Brian Elkington knows what they need and he knows a little about paddlefish throughout their range. Elkington is a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist stationed at the Columbia Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office in the Missouri town of the same name. As dams proliferated, they changed how and when streams flow, and inundated shallow gravel bars in rivers paddlefish need to spawn, says Elkington. Moreover, majorsized dams impeded their upstream spawning migrations, which can be rather extensive. And we're not talking about mere miles, but major exoduses to whole new waters.

Elkington has handled a paddlefish or two on the rivers, but more impressive is that he has handled thousands of data points in a database maintained by the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service for MICRA, or the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association. MICRA comprises 28 states and federal agencies concerned about natural resources management in the Mississippi River basin; 22 of the states have paddlefish populations presently. Since 1997, biologists from Columbia have handled the data from thousands of paddlefish caught from those populations.

Looking at the thin blue lines on a map that shows the paddlefish's range, you can see why the services of Elkington and MICRA are needed. These big arterial rivers vein the country's heartland – and that essentially is the range of the paddlefish. The dendritic meanders cross the straight and artificial lines of state boundaries. But the highly
mobile paddlefish knows no better. One three-foot-long wild fish tagged and released in the Ohio River at Mt. Vernon, Indiana in 1998 was caught by an angler eight years later in the Missouri River at the toe of Gavins Point Dam at Yankton, South Dakota. One presumes it would have gone further to spawn had it not run headlong into the concrete edifice. That fish had navigated some 1,136 miles, moving over several jurisdictional boundaries.

Another fish tagged at Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery went the other direction and was later caught in the Kaskaskia River in Illinois. Thus, you can see that managing paddlefish in a localized fashion is not so practical. Basin-wide coordinated management is needed, and that is where MICRA comes in. Toward that end, Elkington and his colleagues in the Columbia office receive the snouts of recaptured paddlefish where they extract tiny tags as big as a nickel is thick implanted in the fish at an earlier date. Some of the fish were tagged only recently, others date to 17 years or so. Paddlefish live 30 years. No matter the age of the tag, the resulting information that is yielded tells biologists about fish movement, how the fish grow, and in some cases a general sense of population size.

Another important statistic yielded from the tags is the origin of a fish tagging data tells Elkington if they were spawned naturally in the wild, or were tagged at a hatchery before their release into the wild. Since 1995, more than 22,200 adult paddlefish have been caught and tagged in the wild, and 2,037 of them were later recaptured. The database kept up in Columbia also includes 2.1 million paddlefish raised and tagged in the National Fish Hatchery System and hatcheries operated by the state agencies.

Raising paddlefish in captivity is essential to conservation. Given that dams have blocked access to upstream habitats and drowned some spawning beds, captive rearing is necessitated in the short term, a point also underscored by increased demand for their roe in the caviar industry. Captive culture has been good for paddlefish and for fishing. Witness what has happened in Oklahoma. In the Sooner State, there are adequate fisheries supporting regulated harvest by anglers. And some of that is made possible by Tishomingo National Fish Hatchery.

After a 50-year hiatus above Texoma Dam, paddlefish are in the Red River on the Oklahoma-Texas line and in numbers that are harvestable, put there by the Tishomingo hatchery and the Oklahoma Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. They have done the same at Oolagah, Eufaula and Kaw reservoirs in Oklahoma and John Redmond Reservoir in Kansas. The plan according to Tishomingo's manager, fish biologist Kerry Graves, is to put fish out for eight to 10 years. At the end of the period, the fish should be mature and ready to reproduce on their own. They are expected to start making major runs upstream into the rivers that feed the reservoirs.

The work is paying off above Kaw and Oolagah dams. Brent Bristow with the Oklahoma Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office has caught in nets young paddlefish that were ntagged. That means they were naturally hatched there. On Kaw Reservoir, if size is any measure of success, it looks like paddlefish there have hit the mark, topping out at 100 pounds and four feet long. Paddlefish management is a unifying issue for the MICRA group. The range-wide stock assessment of paddlefish continues from Montana to Louisiana to West Virginia.

Elkington and crew will keep up with the data necessary to manage what is arguably one of the greatest natural curiosities that carries the lexis of nature from a whole other time.