The bay seems to represent the pre-glacial path of the
Menominee River, with the valley deepened by glacial carving and then submerged into rising lakewaters.[3]
Bridges
Three bridges cross the bay, including the historic
Sturgeon Bay Bridge, and the recently finished Oregon Street Bridge.
Fish
Sturgeon Bay and Little Sturgeon (just to the south of Sturgeon Bay) are considered
biodiversity hotspots because they support a large number of different fish species.[4]
Researchers collected
viral hemorrhagic septicemia viruses from 184 different fish from 2003 to 2017. Two were found from 2007 to 2010 infecting smallmouth bass within Sturgeon Bay. Each of them was a different variant of a type not found in the middle or lower Great Lakes.[5]
Mayflies
In June 2016, an estimated several thousand mayflies hatched in Sawyer Bay (within Sturgeon Bay). This was the result of an experiment to stock millions of eggs from the species Hexagenia limbata and Hexagenia bilineata in the lower Green Bay area in an attempt to reintroduce the species. The last mayfly from the genus Hexagenia had been collected in the lower Green Bay area in 1955. As mayfly populations can be unstable and not all stocking locations appeared to be successful, as of 2017 it was not yet known whether it would be possible for populations of Hexagenia mayflies to become self-sustaining.[6]
Looking northeast at the mouth of Sturgeon Bay from Potawatomi State Park
View to the southwest across Sturgeon Bay to Cabot Point in the
Idlewild area (background, right) and the bluff at Potawatomi State Park (background, center) from the Old Stone Quarry in Sevastopol; much of the quarry is now George K. Pinney County Park
^The Physical Geography of Wisconsin by Lawrence Martin, Bulletin Number XXXVI, Educational Series Number 4, Madison Wisconsin: Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, 1916 Chapter XII: The Wisconsin Coast of Lake Michigan, page 289