Recruitment of juvenile Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) in the Savannah, Ogeechee, and Satilla Rivers in Georgia

Abstract

— The Atlantic sturgeon ( Acip-enser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus ) is a anad-romous fish found along the east coast of North America and is listed under the Endangered Species Act of the United States. Decades of overfishing and habitat degradation have caused range-wide population declines, and the population status of this species in many rivers is unclear. Quantifying annual recruitment is one way to assess the status of sturgeon populations, but such assessments are few. The objective of this study was to quantify recruitment of juvenile Atlantic sturgeon in the Savannah, Ogeechee, and Satilla Rivers in Georgia. Because we used identical methods in 3 rivers simultaneously, we were able to directly compare recruitment among these populations with that of other populations observed in contemporaneous studies in other rivers. We conducted mark-recapture sampling during 2014–2017 and used Huggins closed population models to estimate annual recruitment. Because there are no historical data for comparison, we evaluated the 3 populations