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  • April

    This lake sturgeon, captured for monitoring and released, is an impressive dinosaur of a fish, covered in rows of diamond-shaped scutes instead of scales. It has four barbels that act as sensory organs hanging from their snout, helping them locate prey. Biologist study lake sturgeon to improve populations and habitat areas. The lake sturgeon is a benthivorous, meaning they eat prey from the bottom of water bodies.

    Incorporating environmental flows through the Sustainable Rivers Program to support lake sturgeon spawning continues to prove successful

    The lake sturgeon, an ancient whisker-snouted fish from the Cretaceous period, is tied to present-day conservation efforts on the Mississippi River at the Melvin Price Locks and Dam in West Alton, Missouri. Despite their name, lake sturgeon, also known as “rubbernose or rock” sturgeon, are found in rivers and lakes. Evolving 150 million years ago, long before the evolution of the T-Rex and the other dinosaurs, they have scale-less skin and diamond-shaped plates along their back. Mature lake sturgeon live up to their unique legacy by reaching eight feet in length, weighing more than 200 pounds, and living over 100 years, making them extraordinarily impressive fish. These giants of the fish world are sustained from a diet of snails, crayfish, mussels, and aquatic insects found with barbel sensors and their suction-like toothless mouths.

  • February

    The St. Louis District’s Dredge Potter assisted by the Kimmswick worked 24/7 through the 2022-23 dredging season on the Mississippi River. The Dredge Potter, built in 1932, is a dustpan dredge. The Kimmswick, commissioned in 2006, assists the dredge with pipeline movements. USACE photo by Janet Meredith, Public Affairs Specialist

    Record setting dredging season comes to an end

    The Dredge Potter crew finished up an unprecedented 2022-23 season on February 1, 2023, that required tremendous teamwork to maintain the congressionally mandated nine-foot-deep, 300-foot-wide navigation channel and overcome the challenges from the widespread drought, and prolonged extreme low water that affected the Mississippi River basin. Dredging operations moved nine million cubic yards of material, at 70 different locations along 300 miles of the St. Louis District. In total, seven dredging units -- dustpan, cutterhead and mechanical -- were working throughout the St. Louis District area of responsibility. Two other units, for a total of nine, supported Mississippi Valley Division efforts on the Mississippi River.