Walleye are cool. But years from now, the Maumee River’s real ambassador might be a pug-nosed, muscle-bound fish with leathery skin known as the lake sturgeon.

If you’re not familiar with these odd-looking behemoths, here are a few choice nuggets: They can grow to 300 pounds and 9 feet long. They’re literally strong enough to knock men down like bowling pins. They aren’t capable of reproducing until they’re 20 years old and, once they reach that age, they’ll reproduce once every four or five years. Females hold as many as 60 pounds of eggs.

It’s not uncommon for lake sturgeon to live 100 years or more — one caught in Lake Michigan in the 1950s was believed to be 150 years old — and they continue to reproduce until they die.

Now for perhaps the most iconic thing about them: They’ve been on Earth no fewer than 150 million years and coexisted with dinosaurs for at least 85 million of them.

Lake sturgeon, which nearly went extinct in the early 1900s, have become a symbol of improving water quality and wildlife-recovery efforts in the Great Lakes region.

Plans are under way to have Toledo follow Detroit as an industrialized city where lake sturgeon can successfully spawn again in water with a murky reputation.

Lake Erie Waterkeeper is working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Toledo Zoo on identifying and enhancing spawning habitat along the Maumee River for the sturgeon.

Several agencies have been successful in re-establishing sturgeon in the Detroit River, a $10 million project that began in 2003.

The Great Lakes region’s biggest stronghold for sturgeon is believed to be Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago, where more than 60,000 of them are in that lake and two of its tributaries, the Wolf and Fox rivers.

Chris Vandergoot, supervisor of the Sandusky Fisheries Research Station operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, said Lake Erie was once “the epicenter of lake sturgeon.”

That’s not a surprise, given how the warm and shallow water of western Lake Erie suits many fish and serves as ideal spawning habitat in general.

Lake Erie has more fish than all of the other Great Lakes combined.

But while there was believed to be anywhere from 330,000 to 1.1 million sturgeon in Lake Erie in the 1800s, the numbers plummeted that century because the commercial fishing industry saw them as a nuisance. The enormous strength and thrashing weight of lake sturgeon tore apart many fishing nets.

“Even a 70 to 80-pound sturgeon can beat the tar out of you in short order,” Mr. Vandergoot told 100 attendees of the annual Lake Erie Waterkeeper conference on Friday.

Efforts to eradicate them began in the 1800s. They were even once used as fuel for Great Lakes steamships.

In the late 1800s, caviar made from their eggs was sold to Europe, where it was relabeled and sold back to the United States as “Russian caviar,” according to Wisconsin Sea Grant. That process was an attempt to mislead the consumer as to the origin of the caviar.

The word caviar has traditionally referred to the eggs of sturgeon from the Caspian and Black seas. The four main types of caviar are Beluga, Sterlet, Ossetra, and Sevruga. The rarest and costliest is from beluga sturgeon that swim in the Caspian Sea, which is bordered by Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.

According to caviar dealer Gourmet Direct International Inc., American sturgeon caviar is comparable in color and flavor to Caspian Ossetra Caviar, but with a big difference in price: $132 for an ounce of the Russian sturgeon caviar vs. $19.90 for the same quantity of American sturgeon caviar.

By the early 1900s, lake sturgeon were nearly extinct. In addition to widespread killings, the fish had trouble sustaining its population as the Industrial Revolution led to dams being constructed along almost every Great Lakes tributary that the fish had used to spawn in.

Native Americans — especially the Menominee of northern Wisconsin, one of the few tribes in the Great Lakes region that was never pushed westward — have drawn parallels between the plight of lake sturgeon and of the American buffalo.

The collaborative effort to re-establish them along the Maumee River is still young.

The area where the Maumee River passes by the Toledo Zoo has been discussed as an ideal location, but — so far — only for the convenience of humans. Scientists haven’t determined yet if that’s the best spot for lake sturgeon to spawn or if there might be a better location to start such an Ohio-based recovery program between the mouth of the river and other points upstream before the Grand Rapids/​Providence dams, Mr. Vandergoot said.

To the north, recovery efforts have been promising.

Bruce Manny, a retired U.S. Geological Survey biologist associated with that agency’s Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor for decades, said during a presentation at the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center on Thursday night that each site identified for spawning in the Detroit River has been productive, except for one at Belle Isle. It has been successful for 14 other species of fish, but not lake sturgeon.

The fish have also taken to man-made spawn habitat in the St. Clair River, but do better closer to Detroit. The Detroit River sites that are productive have 10 times more sturgeon eggs than those in the St. Clair River, he said.

“I’m quite confident we've made a big advance,” Mr. Manny said. “I think the long-term prognosis is very good.”

In most cases, tug boats, barges, and cranes put rocks and boulders into place to create spawning habitat. The location is key: Scientists want to give sturgeon eggs shelter and slow up currents just enough for males and females to spawn, but not too much. When they’re not spawning, lake sturgeon want to be in swift-moving currents, Mr. Manny said.

The federal government has spent $10 million since 2003 to create six spawning sites in the Detroit and St. Clair rivers, and two more are planned.

The lake sturgeon is one of 27 species of sturgeon worldwide, but one of only three that spends its entire life in fresh water. Most others live at sea, seeking out fresh water to spawn.

While all sturgeon have a certain mystique about them, lake sturgeon have an eye-catching snout, a retractable mouth that can hang like a hose from the underside of its head, and a body armored with rows of thick plates instead of scales. They look like huge freshwater fish ready to do battle.

Sandy Bihn, Lake Erie Waterkeeper founder, said successful spawning in the Maumee would generate “buzz for the river.”

“We want to raise awareness of the Maumee River and the fisheries,” Mr. Vandergoot said.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.

First Published March 23, 2015, 4:00 a.m.