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After studying aquatic life around the world, biologist Dr. Anna George found her true calling: protecting the creatures that live in her own backyard.
Strolling through the fish propagation room at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute (TNACI) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dr. Anna George stops to point out the 4-inch-long Southern Appalachian brook trout before moving to the other side of the room to the tiny Barrens topminnows darting around in small glass aquariums.
But it is the lake sturgeon, another species George and her staff are working to save from the impact of habitat destruction, overfishing and dams, that is foremost on her mind.
This morning, the raceways—long, pale-blue tubs where the bony-plated fish have been bred and raised—are empty. The 700 juvenile sturgeon are on their way to Knoxville, where in a couple of hours George’s team will release them into the French Broad River, marking the near-completion of a 20-year effort that has put more than 200,000 specimens back into their native east Tennessee waterways and helped save the species from extinction.
“It’s pretty crazy when you think about how long that is, to realize we’re coming up on the end of it,” says George, 38, who took over as chief research scientist and director of TNACI in 2006 and was recently promoted to the position of vice president of conservation science and education for the entire Aquarium. “We’re starting to look for spawning activity because the biggest metric of success for this whole program is whether the sturgeon actually start breeding in the wild on their own.”
Vivacious and chatty, George is no stereotypical scientist. When she’s excited about her work, which is most of the time, she’s been known to describe various fishes as if they were “Finding Nemo” characters and talk so fast it’s hard to keep up.
“I like to claim it’s the enthusiasm,” she says with a grin. “The world is so gorgeous and fascinating, and fish are so incredible, that I want everyone to have the same enthusiasm that I do.”
As a child, the Houston native frequently moved with her family, from Bogata, Colombia to Tuscaloosa, Alabama and later, Blacksburg, Virginia. Following a seventh-grade class visit to Dauphin Island Marine Lab on the gulf coast, George talked her mom into sending her to a summer sea camp to study ocean fish in Galveston.
After participating in another camp in the Cayman Islands, where she learned to scuba dive and got to see tropical wildlife 100 feet beneath the water’s surface, she knew she wanted to study fish for a living.
But it wasn’t until her junior year at the University of Virginia, when she collected specimens from streams and rivers near Jefferson National Forest, that she fell in love with the freshwater world.
“It really was at Mountain Lake [Biological Station] that I started realizing that here in the Appalachians, we were overlooking the treasures in our backyard,” she says. “We should be very proud of that.”
Not even a six-month stint working with kangaroos, koalas and reef fish in Queensland, Australia, could woo her away from her newfound passion.
“I had a blast. I loved it,” she says. “But I had really been captivated by the class at [the University of] Virginia the semester before. So when I started applying to graduate schools, I applied for freshwater programs.”
