The Exploration Place

There are three living fossils swimming in the Link Gallery.

Meet the Nechako white sturgeon. This prehistoric-looking fish has been around, in one form or another, since the age of the dinosaurs, and the ones in our Link Gallery are a small look at a species that can grow to six metres and weigh over 800 kilograms in the lower Fraser River. Fish that size can be more than 100 years old!

A few things that make them remarkable:

They have no scales. Instead, their bodies are lined with bony plates called scutes, arranged in five rows.

They're toothless. Their mouth sits on the underside of the head and extends outward to suck up food from the river bottom, and they use barbels (whiskers) to find it by touch and taste rather than sight.

They're slow to reproduce. Females in the Nechako system may not spawn until around 40 years old, and even then only once every three to ten years. That's a big part of why protecting them matters so much.

The Nechako white sturgeon is also genetically distinct from the Fraser population, which makes this local fish truly one of a kind.