When sonar surveys spotted a vast pile of rubble in the Columbia River below Bonneville Dam late last winter, officials suddenly worried part of the dam structure was eroding into the river.
"Everybody said, 'Oh my gosh, we need to get divers out there right away,'" recalled Dennis Schwartz, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the dam.
What they found below the spillways in February was not a giant pile of rock at all, but a humongous pile of thousands upon thousands of sturgeon - some of them 14 feet long or longer - lounging together in frigid water at the bottom of the river.
| Sturgeon ball |
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