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Missouri River below rivermile 218 in the state of Missouri. Of 872 pallid sturgeon rangewide records <br />prior to 1998, 70 percent were reported from the Missouri River, 9 percent from the Yellowstone <br />River, and less than 2 percent from the St. Francis, Platte, Ohio, Kansas, and Big Sunflower Rivers <br />(Steve Krentz, pers. comm. 2000). Approximately 10 percent of the Missouri River records were <br />from below Gavins Pont Dam; the majority of records were from intensive sampling efforts in Montana, <br />North and South Dakota, and include recaptures. <br />Early life stages of sturgeon rarely have been collected historically from within the range of the pallid <br />sturgeon. Since 1990, only three occurrences of pallid sturgeon larvae or young -of -the -year have been <br />documented. In 1998, one young -of -the -year pallid sturgeon was captured in the Mississippi River by <br />personnel from the Long Term Resource Monitoring Station near Cape Girardeau, MO (Mike <br />Peterson, MDC, pers. comm. 1999). During the summer of 1998 and 1999, several larval pallid <br />sturgeon, were captured in the lower Missouri River below a restored side - channel area near <br />Columbia, MO (Jim Milligan, USFWS, pers. comp, 1999). The low incidence of larval sturgeon is <br />likely due to low reproductive success of sturgeo or e inability of standard sampling gear to capture <br />young sturgeon. Hesse and Mestl (1993b) collected two sturgeon larvae from the Missouri River <br />adjacent to Nebraska between 1983 and 1991. These larvae were among 147,000 fish larvae <br />collected during filtration of 18,340,014 ft' (519,400 cu m) of river water. Gardner and Stewart <br />(1987) collected no sturgeon larvae in 339 samples from the Missouri River or in 77 samples from <br />tributary streams where 3,124 and 5,526 fish larvae were collected, respectively. Since 1994, <br />additional work by Gardner (1995b) has found young of the year and juvenile sturgeon. Liebelt (1998) <br />has also documented sturgeon reproduction in the Yellowstone drainage in eastern Montana. Liebelt <br />(MTFWP, pers. comm.) sampled over 120 young -of the year shovelnose sturgeon in the Missouri <br />River below the Yellowstone River during the fall of 1999. Although the larval and juvenile sturgeon <br />that were sampled were ultimately identified as the shovelnose species, sampling efficiency for larval <br />and juvenile sturgeon has improved. <br />Population Status and Trends in the Action Area - Duffy et al. (1996) reported that tag and <br />recapture data has allowed researchers to estimate that approximately 50 to 100 pallid sturgeon remain <br />in the Missouri River above Fort Peck Dam in Montana and between 200 and 300 pallid sturgeon <br />remain between Garrison Dam in North Dakota and Fort Peck Dam which also includes the lower <br />Yellowstone River. One to five sightings per year have been made on pallid sturgeon between the <br />headwaters of Oahe Reservoir in North Dakota to the Garrison Dam and from the riverine reach in the <br />Missouri River above Gavins Point Dam to the Fort Randall Dam, suggesting that, perhaps, as many as <br />25 to 50 fish remain in each of these areas. A small population also exists between Oahe Dam and the <br />Big Bend Dam on the Missouri River in South Dakota with perhaps 50 to 100 fish remaining in the <br />upper few miles of riverine section above the headwaters of Lake Sharpe. <br />Very little is known about the current status of the pallid sturgeon population of the Missouri River <br />below Gavins Point Dam. Capture /recapture data is non existent and based on frequency of reports, <br />rough estimates of one to five pallid sturgeon per kilometer of river in the channelized lower Missouri <br />156 Env. Baseline -PS <br />