TRANSCRIPT:
Hello this is Dr. Tom Mullikin with SCDNR for Into the Wild.
Every now and then, a South Carolina river gives you a glimpse of something ancient. Atlantic sturgeon are long, powerful fish covered with rows of hard, bony plates instead of ordinary scales.
They begin life in fresh water, spend much of their adulthood in the ocean, and return to rivers to spawn. Some can grow longer than a person and live for decades. That means a single fish may travel between the Atlantic and the same river system again and again over a very long life.
Their journey depends on connected waterways, clean spawning habitat, and room to move. So when a sturgeon returns upriver, it is more than a migration. It is a reminder that the health of our coast begins far inland, and the story of a river does not stop where fresh water meets the sea.