Posts Tagged ‘CITES’
Nonsurgical Live Removal of Caviar
The need for nonsurgical live removal of caviar from the host mother is one of the best ways to help sustain the sturgeon’s population to a level where it can be removed from the endangered species list. This technique is called stripping the roe from its mother.
The reason stripping is now the preferred method for the removal of the roe for human consumption is that the sturgeon then lives on and can produce another batch of eggs. Unfortunately most species of sturgeon only go thru the reproductive cycle once every three years. This is considerable better than the 20 years required for a sturgeon to be hatched then grow to maturity before it can start to produce roe of its own.
The old way of extracting the roe from the female sturgeons was to slice the belly of the fish open and remove the ovaries that contained the unfertilized eggs. There were some fisheries that were stitching up the females after the ovaries were removed so the fish could live on, but with no ovaries to produce the desired caviar, the fish had no more use for the caviar industry or able to reproduce to help keep the population from collapsing.
The process of stripping itself came from the salmon fisheries. There they used to strip the roe and sperm from adults so a new generation of salmon could be raised. To perform this procedure the sturgeon is generally anesthetized. This allows for less harm to come to the roe and the mother.
This procedure is done by hand where a person takes the fish by the tail with one hand. The other hand then applies pressure to the ovaries externally so the roe can flow out. This is then collected and inspected. Because each fish is different and the quality of its roe will vary, each collection process is done in separate containers so the higher quality caviar can early be separated from the lower grade ones.
This practice of stripping has been performed by the fisheries in Iran for some time now. It is also the reason the Iranian Caviar was not banned for human consumption when all other counties were by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 2005. The reason for the ban in America was purely a political one that most agree with.
The use of nonsurgical live removal of caviar still allows for the harvesting of this delicacy without endangering the lives of the sturgeons that product them. As long as some of the roe are allowed to hatch, the population of all sturgeon species can be maintained and grow so a sustained supply of caviar can exist in the future for human consumption and enjoyment.
South Korea Emerges as Unlikely Source of Caviar
The unfertilized eggs of the sturgeon have made the fish one of the world’s most valuable wildlife resources. Some 90 percent of the world’s caviar comes from sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, but uncontrolled fishing after the collapse of the Soviet Unio…
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No CommentsBeluga Sturgeon Caviar
image via wikipedia
The beluga sturgeon is the best known of these ancient fish that supply the world with the best caviar. This is a very large predatory fish that matures late and is very slow growing. It is said that some beluga have reached the age of 118 before dying of old age but take up to 20 years before they mature enough to spawn.
This is a sea creature that can be found mainly in the Caspian Sea but also are known to inhabit the Black and Adriatic Seas. Just like the salmon, the sturgeon lives their entire lives in the open sea but travel up fresh water rivers to span.
The largest known capture of one of these giants occurred in 1827 when a fisherman from the Volga estuary in Russia snagged it. It weighed 3,250 pounds and had a length of 24 feet. It was a female which is known to be as much as 20% larger than their male counterparts. The female sturgeon only produces eggs every three to four years, so their reproductive cycle is longer than most living creatures.
The beluga is well known for its roe or eggs. Unfortunately the meat of these large predatory animals is not so highly prized and goes to waste in most cases. The roe is the largest of the known caviar. It has a characteristic color of nearly black to a light grey. The lighter the color of the roe, the older the fish is.
There is another variety of beluga roe that is rarely seen anymore. This is the Almos roe or centennial beluga. The color of its roe is nearly white and is extremely rare since most sturgeons no longer reach the age of 100 due to the over fishing of this species that has existed for centuries.
Early in the 21st century the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species set quotas for the amount of caviar that can be harvested and sold on the open market. Unfortunately these quotas have done little to halt the decline in the wild population of the sturgeon as reported by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science. This decline has seen the population of the beluga to be reduced by 90 percent in the last 20 years.
Ironically the most valued of all caviar is not from the beluga sturgeon, but from their cousin the ossetra sturgeon. This is the source of the famous Russian Imperial Ossetra caviar.
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No CommentsBuy Caviar
