Otter Tail County warns sturgeon active, urges anglers to leave them alone

Sturgeon are still active in Otter Tail County waters, and county officials are telling anglers to keep their distance until inland Minnesota’s catch-and-release season opens June 16.

The warning matters because lake sturgeon are moving now, heading into large rivers in spring to spawn in rocky, swift-flowing habitat. That makes them especially vulnerable to disturbance in the Upper Otter Tail River system, where the county’s lakes and rivers draw heavy recreation and fishing traffic.

Minnesota inland waters allow catch-and-release for both lake and shovelnose sturgeon from June 16 through April 14. Until then, anglers who spot a sturgeon in county waters are being urged not to handle or bother the fish. The county’s post about the sightings has drawn strong local attention, a sign of how closely residents watch changes in the water.

The concern is tied to a long restoration effort in the Red River Basin, where agencies have spent years trying to bring sturgeon back to habitat that once could not support them. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says the Upper Otter Tail Connectivity Project will reconnect 20 miles of critical spawning habitat to 69 miles of previously reconnected aquatic migratory pathways, for a cumulative reconnection of more than 42,000 acres of lacustrine habitat to critical stream spawning habitat.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the project includes replacing two undersized culverts with two span bridges where U.S. Highway 10 crosses the Otter Tail River. The existing culverts create high velocities that fish cannot pass during the spring spawning period, a bottleneck that had long limited movement through the river system.

State biologists have already documented sturgeon using newly built rocky habitat on the Otter Tail River and exhibiting spawning behavior there. That buildout follows a broader recovery effort in the basin that has stocked more than 580,000 lake sturgeon fingerlings. The DNR says it found the first mature female sturgeon in the basin in 2019, then documented the first natural spawning event on the Otter Tail River in more than 100 years three years later.

Restoration work in the river and other Red River tributaries began in 1997 with juvenile lake sturgeon stocking. For Otter Tail County, where water access shapes both summer recreation and fisheries management, the current sightings are another reminder that recovery is visible on the water and that spring is still a critical time to give sturgeon room.