On the Eastern Shore’s Marshyhope Creek this September, two guests joined state fish researchers. Ashlee Horne, a survey manager with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, wanted to show them a good time, so, when they hadn’t landed anything by late in the day, she started to feel “twitchy.”

Then it happened: A sturgeon’s fins thrashed in a gill net not far from their survey boat.

What the group at first thought was “a little one” turned out to be the biggest female sturgeon caught by the DNR’s Anadromous Restoration team since their survey started in 2014.

At 7 feet, 10 inches and over 200 pounds, the female would be the last fish the team netted this year. They named her “Chessie,” after the mythical sea creature said to lurk in the Chesapeake Bay.

For Horne, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist who has spent about a decade surveying shad, sturgeon and other ocean-faring migratory fish that spawn in the Chesapeake Bay, the discovery was rejuvenating.

“We’ve all seen so many. We’ve had such a really good year this year,” she said. “We’ve caught so many fish, and it was like catching the first one.”

This was the most successful year yet for Horne’s sturgeon survey team (the four-person team captured and tagged 10 new sturgeon), but the DNR celebrated this one as special.

“We found Chessie!” the agency announced on Facebook last month. “She is not the mystical Chesapeake Bay sea monster, but she is rare.”

An ancient species, sturgeon have patrolled earth’s waters since the time of dinosaurs 120 million years ago. With long snouts and bony plates resembling armor, they look the prehistoric part.

Declared endangered in the Chesapeake Bay in 2012, Atlantic sturgeon live somewhat mysterious lives. For many years, scientists believed these fish had stopped spawning in the bay entirely, only to be proven wrong recently.

Though they come to the Chesapeake’s tributaries to spawn, sturgeon spend most of their lives in the salty ocean. Experts know little about their early years. Fishermen and scientists almost never see young sturgeon, Horne said. Her team has spent many hours trawling for juveniles but hasn’t caught a single one.

They also grow really, really big.

Though Chessie was a record sturgeon for the DNR survey, she’s hardly the largest of her kind to enter the Chesapeake Bay.

A few years ago, one waterman caught a sturgeon that, judging from his photo, may have been over 10 feet long. The largest Atlantic sturgeon ever caught, netted in coastal Canada, was over 14 feet long and weighed more than 800 pounds.

Chessie, meanwhile, still has room to grow. Horne believes the fish is at least 25 years old, but her species can live to over 60.

It took four people to hoist her out of the Marshyhope, a tributary of the Nanticoke River, and the surveyors doubted whether she would fit into the trough used to weigh their catch.

For Makaila Ballah, a member in the Maryland Conservation Corps, joining the expedition was a treat. She’d won her spot on the DNR boat in a raffle last year and had looked forward to it.

Ballah, 24, wants to be a wildlife manager, and the discovery of the river monster only reinforced her feeling that “this is the best kind of job that you can have.”

“It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is awesome,’” she remembered.

Scientists like Horne still have a lot of questions about the sturgeon, but answers may get harder to find.

The Anadromous Restoration team depends on federal funding for its sturgeon research, and, for the first time in over two decades, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration didn’t renew the program that supports this work, part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the agency.

The DNR has allowed the team to continue sturgeon research — now unfunded — on a limited basis, mostly because the team already has the equipment.

After pulling Chessie into the boat, surveyors tagged her with trackers that ping sensors when she passes nearby and released her back into the Marshyhope.

Chilly waters have since returned to the bay, and, in all likelihood, Chessie is swimming somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean today.