Listen to the Song – The Ancient Giant
The complete lyrics are included in the companion book, Our Jewels in the Water, allowing readers to follow every song while discovering the remarkable stories behind our freshwater and migratory fish.
Enjoying the music?
The companion book Our Jewels in the Water includes the full lyrics, additional stories, exclusive photographs and beautiful illustrations for every species.
The European Sturgeon
The Ancient Giant
“From an age long before our own, an ancient giant follows the river — carrying millions of years of history upon its armoured back.”
Species Profile
The European Sturgeon (Acipenser sturio) is one of the most extraordinary fish ever associated with Britain’s rivers and coastal waters.
Its appearance seems to belong to another age.
Instead of the conventional scales found on most familiar fish, the Sturgeon carries rows of hard, bony plates known as scutes along its body.
Its elongated snout, underslung mouth, sensitive barbels and distinctive tail make it unmistakable.
European Sturgeon are migratory fish, spending much of their adult lives in marine and estuarine waters before entering rivers to reproduce.
They can grow to an enormous size and live for many decades.
To encounter one in British waters today would be an exceptionally rare event.
This is not simply another fish.
It is The Ancient Giant.
Clive’s Story
There are some fish that immediately make you think about history.
The Sturgeon is one of them.
Look at one and you can almost imagine you are seeing a creature from another world.
The great ridges along its body.
The long snout.
The barbels hanging beneath it.
That powerful tail.
Everything about the fish seems ancient.
As anglers, we often talk about the history of our sport.
But the Sturgeon’s history makes our own seem almost insignificant.
Long before the first fishing rod was made, long before our towns and cities appeared beside the rivers, fish with this ancient body plan were already swimming through the world’s waters.
There is something humbling about that.
Natural History
The European Sturgeon is an anadromous fish.
This means that it spends much of its adult life in marine or estuarine environments but migrates into freshwater rivers to reproduce.
Sturgeon feed primarily on animals found on or near the bottom.
Their four sensitive barbels help them locate food, while their downward-facing mouth is well adapted for picking up prey from the river or seabed.
Their diet can include worms, molluscs, crustaceans and other bottom-dwelling organisms.
European Sturgeon mature slowly and may take many years before reproducing.
That slow life cycle makes them particularly vulnerable when adult fish are removed or spawning habitat is damaged.
For a species that has survived for such an extraordinary period of evolutionary history, the modern world has presented some of its greatest challenges.
Interesting Facts
- Scientific name: Acipenser sturio
- Family: Acipenseridae.
- Commonly known as the European or Atlantic Sturgeon.
- Belongs to an ancient lineage of fishes.
- Has rows of hard bony scutes rather than ordinary fish scales.
- Possesses four sensitive barbels beneath the snout.
- Has an underslung mouth adapted for bottom feeding.
- Migrates between marine waters and freshwater rivers.
- Can grow to an impressive size.
- Can be remarkably long-lived.
- Matures relatively slowly.
- Once occurred much more widely across European waters.
- Now exceptionally rare across much of its former range.
Behind the Song
When writing The Ancient Giant, I wanted the music to feel as though it came from somewhere deep in time.
The Sturgeon isn’t a fish that seems to belong only to the present.
Its appearance connects us with an ancient world.
I imagined a great fish moving slowly along the bottom of a river while generations of people came and went above it.
Kingdoms rise.
Cities grow.
Bridges cross the river.
The landscape changes.
Yet beneath the water the ancient traveller continues its journey.
That sense of time became the heart of the song.
The Ancient Giant is not simply about the size of the fish.
It is about the enormous history it carries with it.
Conservation
The European Sturgeon’s story is also one of the most serious conservation stories in this collection.
Once much more widespread, populations collapsed dramatically as a result of overfishing, loss of spawning habitat, pollution and barriers to migration.
Because Sturgeon mature slowly, depleted populations can take an extremely long time to recover.
Today the European Sturgeon is critically endangered and subject to strict protection.
Conservation programmes in Europe are working to protect surviving fish, restore populations and preserve suitable river habitat.
The lesson is an important one.
Even a species whose ancestors have survived extraordinary changes over millions of years can be brought close to extinction in a remarkably short period of human history.
Ancient does not mean invincible.
Clive’s Reflection
The Sturgeon makes me think about our responsibility to the generations that will come after us.
Here is a fish whose lineage stretches back through an almost unimaginable length of time.
It survived changing climates.
Changing seas.
Changing rivers.
And countless transformations of the natural world.
Yet within a comparatively tiny period of history, humans managed to reduce this extraordinary survivor to a fraction of its former abundance.
There is a lesson in that.
We cannot assume that because something has always existed, it always will.
Our rivers are full of stories inherited from the past.
The question is whether we will pass those stories on.
I would like to think that somewhere in the future, a child might stand beside a European river and know that beneath the surface an ancient fish is swimming once again.
Not merely surviving in a photograph or a history book.
But alive.
Wild.
And continuing a journey that began millions of years before any of us arrived.
That is why the Sturgeon truly deserves its name.
The Ancient Giant.
“It survived the passage of ages — now its future depends upon us.”