June 26, 2006 — A new pilot study may yield valuable information about a species of sturgeon hearty enough to have survived from prehistoric times but now on the brink of extinction due to the insatiable appetite for caviar.
The University of Miami's Pew Institute for Ocean Science will tag fish for the first comprehensive study of the beluga population in the Caspian Sea of central Asia.
A worldwide study released by the Pew Institute last year said most major sturgeon fisheries are catching 85 percent fewer fish than at their peak in the late 1970s. It called for a total ban on fishing for most endangered species and reducing fishing pressure on others.
Beluga, whose roe is one of the world's most expensive delicacies, is the most threatened species of sturgeon. And the population in the Caspian — which provides 90 percent of beluga caviar — "got hammered very fast," said Phaedra Doukakis, a Pew Institute research scientist.
There is no reliable estimate of how many Caspian beluga remain.
According to the Pew Institute, they numbered around 375,000 in 2001, with just 55,000 of them adults.
That year, scientists from Russia and Iran — the countries that benefit most from the beluga caviar trade — came up with a figure of 9.3 million. In 2002, they estimated more than 11 million.
Doukakis dismissed those figures as "a fantasy." Scientists widely criticized the estimates and Russia and Iran have not issued any numbers since.
Beluga, the largest fish in the Caspian, can live over 100 years and grow to nearly 20 feet. But these days few survive longer than 20 years.
In Kazakhstan, one of the five nations ringing the Caspian, Akhat Nimatov, director of a state-run sturgeon hatchery that works with the Pew Institute, said the beluga population has declined 70 percent over the past 15 years.
The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which sets sturgeon fishing quotas each year, imposed a ban on taking sturgeon and exporting caviar from the Caspian this year after the surrounding states failed to submit a convincing plan to protect the fish.
The Persian species concentrated in Iranian waters was exempted from the ban because it is not endangered.
Doukakis said the ban would not help because the treaty, known as CITES, has no tools to implement its rules and because "there seem to be enough outlets for illegal trade or a big enough domestic market."
The caviar trade is so lucrative it makes poaching hard to resist and control. One female beluga produces up to 17 percent of her total weight in caviar. A pound of beluga caviar costs an average $2,700 in Europe and North America.
The damage from legal fishing is also significant. The Caspian sturgeon was first put under heavy pressure during the Soviet era. But the 1991 Soviet collapse didn't make things better as the emergence of three more states on the Caspian shores — Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — has meant fragmented regulation.
