The rivers' fish: sturgeon water to carp water, and partway back

1812 — the present surveys

The soldiers' river: The earliest dated fish record on the Maumee comes from its lower river in wartime. Crail and Grabarkiewicz's Guide to the Common Fishes of the Toledo Area (2008) records that soldiers stationed at Fort Meigs during the War of 1812 "reported numbers of walleye and sturgeon so thick that thousands could be harvested in a day with a spear or simple fishing pole," and that gristmill dam owners on the tributaries harvested walleye at their new dams "until local populations crashed" — the first documented fish kill of the settlement era, by infrastructure. Those reports are from Perrysburg, on the lower river; they are printed here as the Maumee's documented baseline, the river Fort Wayne's three streams become.

The sturgeon and the seventeen: The lake sturgeon, the largest fish in the system at over seven feet and 200 pounds, "disappeared from the Maumee River sometime in the early 1900s," in Metroparks Toledo's account, and could not return on its own — sturgeon fry imprint on their birth river, and no Maumee-born sturgeon survived to come back. The scientific ledger is wider: Schmidt and colleagues, in the Journal of Great Lakes Research (2020), record that seventeen species that historically spawned in the Maumee River have been extirpated over the past century, among them the lake sturgeon, muskellunge, northern pike, and lake whitefish. The walleye survived as the river's great remaining run: each spring, when the water warms to between 43 and 50 degrees, tens of thousands of walleye move up the Maumee to spawn, in one of the largest fish migrations in the Great Lakes — a run whose famous riffles lie in Ohio, below the state line, and whose fish are present in Fort Wayne's Maumee as residents and migrants.

The return, stocked: In the fall of 2018 the sturgeon's absence ended by hand: 3,000 young lake sturgeon were released into the Maumee in the first step of a planned twenty years of annual releases, raised by the Toledo Zoo and partners from eggs, with the stated goal of a self-sustaining spawning population of the river's largest fish. A Maumee sturgeon must live fifteen to twenty-five years before it spawns, so the verdict on the return belongs to the 2030s and 2040s; the record as it stands is releases begun, not recovery achieved.

Fort Wayne's own water, measured: The Indiana DNR's two-year study of Fort Wayne-area fisheries, reported in the News-Sentinel, sampled six sites — two on each of the three rivers, including Shoaff Park and the St. Joseph Dam, Lawton Park and Foster Park West, Hosey Dam and Maumee Park — and captured nearly 1,000 fish weighing nearly 1,000 pounds. Its arithmetic is the modern baseline: non-game fish, carp and suckers chief among them, made up 67 percent of the catch by number and over 83 percent by weight, and carp alone nearly 40 percent of the weight; sport fish were present — largemouth and smallmouth bass, white crappie, catfish, and 17 saugeye, the largest over 24 inches and 6½ pounds — but mostly small. Habitat at the 2009 sites rated from poor to good. Riverfront Fort Wayne's summary of the DNR survey record lists the rivers' present company: saugeye, both basses, crappies, bluegill, catfish, river and creek chubs, yellow bullhead, and longear sunfish.

Sources:

1. Todd D. Crail and Jeffrey D. Grabarkiewicz, A Guide to the Common Fishes of the Toledo Area (2008) — the Fort Meigs account and the mill-dam crashes, toledonaturalist.org.
2. Metroparks Toledo, "Fishy Business along the Towpath and Beyond" (the walleye run; the sturgeon's early-1900s disappearance and 2018 return), metroparkstoledo.com; Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Wild Ohio, Spring 2019 (the 2018 release of 3,000 sturgeon and the twenty-year plan).
3. B. A. Schmidt et al., "Determining habitat limitations of Maumee River walleye production to western Lake Erie fish stocks," Journal of Great Lakes Research (2020) — the seventeen extirpated spawning species, after Karr et al. (1985).
4. News-Sentinel account of the Indiana DNR two-year Fort Wayne fisheries study (six sites; catch composition; the saugeye), as reposted in the Team Unstable forum archive; Riverfront Fort Wayne, "About" (the DNR survey species list), riverfrontfw.org.