A B.C. man was diving in the ocean off Galiano Island when he came face to face with a sturgeon.
Zeuss Cochrane was about 15 metres deep in the water near Saltry Bay on Saturday when he felt something ‘bump’ him.
"I was super nervous for some reason going down. I'm not usually,” he says. "I felt a bump. I thought I felt a couple of bumps earlier.”
He decided to look around.
“My heart just jumped out of my skin and this giant fish... Its face was right in my face."
The roughly three-metre-long animal swam by him. Cochrane decided to paddle beside it, at which point he realized it was a sturgeon.
"I had never seen that before,” he tells Glacier Media.
Cochrane has completed 50 dives this year already and calls Galiano home. When he saw the sturgeon, his first reaction was to giggle.
"That was pretty amazing,” he says of the encounter, adding he was a bit nervous.
Cochrane is part of a non-profit biodiversity group that is documenting and cataloguing everything on the island with the hopes of keeping an eye on invasive species.
"Galiano used to be a diving mecca for people from all over," he says.
Ocean-swimming sturgeon shows signs there may be others
Sturgeon are an anadromous fish: they're born in freshwater, migrate to the ocean to grow into adults and return to freshwater to spawn.
A B.C. sturgeon expert was fascinated by the incident off Galiano Island.
Marvin Rosenau, a BCIT instructor in the fish, wildlife and recreation program, identified the fish off Galiano Island as a white sturgeon.
“Our Fraser River fish usually don't move out of the Fraser all that much, but about 10 per cent of them show a signature of marine life,” he says. “They went out and then they came back in.”
Having this sturgeon out in the ocean makes him wonder how many more there could be.
“There still is a question of, you know, how many are there out there? And are they coming or going?” he says. “The debate has always been: how many fish are actually outside of the freshwater component of the Fraser?”
This face-to-face encounter is uncommon, he adds.
“That's pretty cool. I think it's rare,” says Rosenau. "It sounds like he kind of snuggled up to the diver and was kind of playing with him.”
According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, scientists believe that white sturgeon on the upper Columbia River did not historically migrate to the ocean like the sturgeon of the lower Columbia.
"Scientists do believe that the sturgeons' movements have been greatly affected within the upper Columbia basin by the development of numerous hydroelectric dams, and today they are effectively a landlocked species spending no time in the ocean," states DFO.
Rosenau describes the fish as powerful, sleeping giants.
"Nature will always surprise you when you think you've got it figured out… boom. Nature will surprise you,” he says.
