From the archive
30 Sep 2026
On 18 September, on the bank of the Ina at Goleniów in north-west Poland, several hundred people turned up to put fish in the water. Schoolchildren, anglers and pensioners watched as fifteen larger juvenile Atlantic sturgeon and several thousand smaller ones, each about fifteen centimetres long, were released into the river. It was the first such release on the Polish side of the Oder Delta, after earlier ones across the border in Germany.
Sturgeon once ran up the Baltic's tributaries in numbers. They vanished from the region during the twentieth century, taken apart piece by piece: overfished, then shut out of their spawning grounds by straightened, embanked and dammed rivers, then poisoned by pollution. What is left of the animal sounds invented - armour in five rows of bony plates, whisker-like barbels for finding food on the riverbed, a lifespan measured in decades, a weight that can pass 350 kilograms.
The fish released in September had been prepared with unusual care. Their larvae came from Germany, where the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and a Mecklenburg-Vorpommern research institute oversaw hatching. Rearing happened at the Polish Anglers Union's fish farm in Goleniów, in tanks fed with water from the Wiśniówka, a tributary of the Ina itself, on natural food only - so the fish entered the river already accustomed to its chemistry and its diet.
The Ina was chosen because it is ready. Rewilding Oder Delta and local partners have spent years taking out migration barriers, restoring spawning grounds and rewetting riverside land, reconnecting the delta's rivers to the Stettin Lagoon and the Baltic beyond. Sturgeon are demanding tenants - they need free-flowing, oxygen-rich water - which is precisely why they were chosen. A river that suits a sturgeon suits salmon, eels and almost everything else.
September's release is a beginning on a long clock. The partners plan more than 20,000 young sturgeon in 2027, and eventually as many as 100,000 a year. Even then, nobody will know quickly whether it has worked: a fish that lives for many decades takes its time about proving a population self-sustaining.
If you rear fish for release, raise them on water drawn from the river they will enter and feed them natural food - the Goleniów tanks ran on a tributary of the Ina itself. And count the weirs before you count the fish: years of barrier removal came before a single sturgeon was stocked.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source