"If I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere."
This famous tune from the film New York, New York might be what shortnose sturgeon would belt out if they could sing.
That's because the endangered fish have made a surprise recovery in the Hudson River under the shadows of Manhattan's skyscrapers, a new study shows.
The sturgeon has been so successful that it could join the handful of species that have been removed from the U.S. endangered species list—becoming the first fish to do so.
"We don't need to necessarily have parks and pristine landscapes to recover species," said biologist and study leader Mark Bain of Cornell University.
"We can do it in the midst of people sometimes."
More than 60,000 shortnose sturgeon now swim in the Hudson River, Bain and colleagues report in last week's issue of the open-access journal PLoS One.
This is about four times as many fish as could be found in the river in the 1970s, the last time researchers did a survey of the species.
Slow Recovery
The shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) has been on the endangered species list since the Endangered Species Preservation Act was passed in 1966.
The fish's numbers had likely been declining for more than a hundred years before that.
The sturgeon used to be fished heavily to make a popular smoked meat known as Albany beef, named for the fish's upstream spawning site near the state capital of Albany (see a map of New York).
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