Sturgeon Stocks Declining Rapidly
Pollution and Overfishing Severely Damaging Beluga Sturgeon
Sep 20, 2008
The Caspian Sea is polluted and the Beluga Sturgeon has been over-exploited for its famous caviar.
Beluga Sturgeon
The Beluga, or European Sturgeon (Huso huso) is an enormous fish, up to eighteen feet long, and it can live for over 100 years. It is a predator, and like all sturgeon (there are over twenty species) it spawns in fresh water and ventures into estuaries and other salty water to feed. Females take a long time to mature (up to 20 years), and even then will usually not reproduce each year. This low reproductive potential makes sturgeon very susceptible to overfishing.
Pollution and Overfishing are Damaging Caspian Sea Beluga Sturgeon Stocks
- The river Volga runs into the land-locked Caspian Sea, and pollution is damaging the stocks of Beluga Sturgeon. There are attempts to limit the level of fishing, but poaching is always a problem and the Beluga Sturgeon is thought to be close to extinction.
- The most famous caviar in the world is the black caviar of the beluga from the Caspian Sea. This land-locked lake is about a third as salty as the sea and although it was once an ideal place for sturgeon to mature the stock has declined dramatically.
- Unfortunately it is necessary to kill a female sturgeon to harvest the eggs, and, while the flesh of the fish is not a great delicacy, the eggs – caviar – from a single female can be worth as much as $3,000. With such an enormous cash incentive it is easy to see the temptation to poach and overfish.
Farming Beluga Sturgeon for Caviar
Recently there have been attempts to farm Beluga Sturgeon, rearing fry from fertile eggs. In Israel, for example, over 40,000 are being raised to maturity in large outdoor pools (Science Daily, 29 August 2008), and by 2010 this venture is expected to make the company over seven million dollars! It is only possible to tell the sex of young sturgeons by looking inside them (with an endoscope), and this is done regularly to ‘weed out’ the males.
Eating Caviar
- Russian Caviar is usually eaten on toast, often with iced Vodka, but there are many other ways to try it. Caviar goes very well with oysters, smoked salmon and even cherry tomatoes. It is sometimes eaten with cream cheese, often on blinis. Purists prefer to use non-metallic spoons, claiming that metal spoons interfere with the taste. (It is possible to buy special ‘caviar spoons’!).
- Genuine caviar comes only from sturgeon, and there are many textures and colours. With the declining numbers of sturgeon worldwide the eggs (roe) of many other fish (such as salmon and lumpsucker) are now available at much less cost.
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