Females do not carry eggs annually, they take many years to reach sexual maturity and, of the , — , eggs they can release at one time, only two or three fish will survive. Damming and decline As the last of eight hydroelectric works in the Volga-Kama cascade of dams, the Volgograd Hydroelectric station is the first barrier sturgeon migrating upstream from the Caspian Sea will encounter. In theory sturgeon can pass the dam thanks to a hydraulic fish-lift in the original design.
However, it is not clear whether the lift is still operational and, even if it is, its benefits have been counteracted by further dams built upstream. Even if fish do manage to cross the dam, the return journey can prove fatal, as it often requires passing through turbines that can weigh as much as a aeroplane. The Volgograd Hydroelectric station not only blocks sturgeon migration, but alters the natural flow and temperature of the river.
Sturgeon are very sensitive and rely upon signals such as flow speed and temperature to determine when and where to reproduce. Therefore, the dam is said to have directly reduced the spawning grounds of sturgeon from 3, hectares to only hectares.
For beluga sturgeon in particular, 90 per cent of their natural spawning grounds have disappeared as a result of the Volgograd dam. An illegal caviar trade is flourishing It is undeniable that the Volgograd station has played a part in the demise of the Russian caviar industry.
Due to rapidly declining wild sturgeon populations, Russia banned commercial sturgeon fishing and black caviar exports in Now, Russia allows just 9 tonnes of the delicacy to be sold on the domestic market annually, produced by a few government-regulated fish farms. When officers inspected the vehicle, which was a converted minibus, they found pots filled with black caviar hidden under branches that are used in Russian funeral rituals. Police then cracked open the coffin, which was wrapped in pink frilly cloth, and discovered kilograms 1, pounds of caviar.
The two men driving the hearse, which belongs to a local funeral home, claimed they were unaware the coffin was full of fish eggs. They told police a man they did not know had asked them to pick up the body of a recently deceased woman and transport it to a local morgue.
Police are now investigating. It is illegal in Russia to privately harvest or sell black caviar, which comes from the endangered sturgeon fish. Caviar Prosecutions U. Defendants were found guilty of the following counts: One, smuggling black market sturgeon caviar into the U.
United States v. PDF 7. The Department of Justice announced today that Mariusz Chomicz, the President of a caviar company in Poland, pled guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his part in a caviar smuggling conspiracy.
The conspiracy ring used paid couriers to smuggle suitcases filled with caviar into the United States after new international restrictions were announced in to protect sturgeon. Fish and Wildlife Service FWS , as well as selling counterfeit caviar to retail food companies with false labels in violation of the Lacey Act, a wildlife protection statute.
Was this page helpful? Yes No. After the break up of the Soviet Union in , a long-standing agreement between the Soviet Union and Iran, regulating sturgeon fishing, collapsed. As citizens of the former Soviet Union lost their jobs and saw their buying power decline, illegal sturgeon fishing became a temptation that was too hard for many to resist. Most illegal fishing is done with wide-mesh nets or drift nets at night. During the six-week spawning period legal fishermen are joined by illegal fisherman as well as armed guards and patrols that try to hunt them down.
On the shores of rivers in Kazakhstan, ordinary citizens stick poles in the mud with lines attached. Known as watchmen, the yard-long lines are attached to loops that grasp fish when they swim through them.
The fishermen, many of them housewives and unemployed men, play cards while they are waiting and jump up when a fish is on the line. When inspectors come by they quickly scatter.
Male sturgeon provide steaks that feed families or are sold for some cash. Describing an illegal caviar fishermen in action, Lee Hockstader wrote in the Washington Post, "Four glistening Caspian Sea sturgeon, armor plated, freshly gutted, are still writhing in the grass Using a filthy bathtub.. Genya sets about straining, rinsing and salting the sturgeon's yield, 25 pounds of pearly black caviar.
It thrives because there is a lot of money to be made, corruption in the industry is rampant and it is difficult to trace the source of caviar. The illegal caviar trade is believed to controlled the Russian mafia. An estimated caviar gangs were believed to be operating along to mile coastline of Dagestan in the late s and early s. In , 67 people were killed in a war between the caviar mafia there and local police. The clash included the bombing of a nine-story building where border guards were housed.
Reputable caviar traders in the United States and Western Europe generally do not deal with dodgy, illegal caviar sellers, who are more likely to find buyers in Russia or Eastern Europe. On the streets of some Caspian Sea towns, sahdy characters whisper under their breath "Do you want caviar?
The caviar is often very poor quality. Black market caviar has been sold on E-Bay. In the early s, around police in patrol boats took positions in the Caspian Sea near the Volga during the spawning season to combat illegal sturgeon fishing.
Some anti-poaching units were equipped with assault weapons and night vision goggles In , Russian police and border guards found more than 70 tons of sturgeon trapped in illegal nets. Even so, overall policemen and other security forces are often provide little help in tackling the illegal caviar trade. Some take bribes and demand some of the caviar or sturgeon meat, or even work for smugglers and illegal fishermen.
A number of officers and investigators looking into the illegal caviar trade have died in mysterious circumstances. Authorities are overstretched just trying to stop the poachers. Conservationists are pessimistic. The former Soviet republics lack strong rule of law and the means to enforce the rules, especially where organized crime is in control.
Some have suggested a boycott of caviar is necessary similar to the successful ban on ivory in In the Soviet era, fishing limits were strictly enforced. Poaching was not a problem but pollution was. The number of sturgeon declined from a peak of million in to 97 million in Since the break up of the Soviet Union, sturgeon stocks have plummeted. The number of sturgeon in the Caspian Sea crashed from million to 60 million in only five years between and as a result of overfishing.
By , there around 40 million. The fish caught are considerably smaller than fish caught in earlier years and there is a shortage of adults, particularly breeding females. The numbers has crashed before. Sturgeon fisheries were hurt by the building of dams on the Volga in the s.
There was also massive overfishing in the s. These numbers were highly suspect, especially considering the fact that sturgeon take so long to mature. Some environmentalists have said the entire caviar industry is in danger of collapsing and the beluga sturgeon could become extinct in 10 years.
They estimate that the population of beluga sturgeon has declined by as much as 90 percent. Others say this is an exaggeration. Other factors include the loss of spawning grounds, reduced river flows, river damming, rising Caspian Sea levels.
Sturgeons were once plentiful around the world. They were caught in Japan, Britain and France but now are largely gone there. They can still be found in the United States but the species there don't produce great caviar. One Caspian species is already regarded as extinct from a commercial fishing point of view. In China, the Yangtze sturgeon and its cousin the Chinese paddlefish are nearly extinct and the Three Gorges dam is expected to finish them off.
Sturgeons feed off sea, river and lake bottoms where heavy oil and other pollutants settle. Many sturgeon now bear 25 pounds of gray mush instead of shiny black eggs. These rotten eggs are believed to be caused by pollution from petrochemical plants, oil and raw sewage.
The situation is expected to get worse in the Caspian Sea as oil production there is increased, especially if there is an oil spill or large pipeline leak. Fishermen say they often have to throw fish back because they are infected with a serious virus or suffer from myopaty disease, which causes the degradation of muscular and sexual tissues, preventing reproduction.
Many fish have been poisoned by a giant gas-extraction plant built near the mouth of the Volga River. Sturgeon used to migrate as far as 1, miles up the Volga before the dams were built. The changing level of the Caspian Sea is believed to be affecting sturgeon populations. A one meter rise in the s submerged two sturgeon hatcheries and cause rivers to flow more slowly, which in turn has causes silt to accumulate, blocking channels sturgeon used to migrate into the river.
If the fish do manage to make it to their spawning grounds very rarely do they return to the Caspian Sea alive. As a result Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan agreed in June to halt sturgeon fishing for the rest of the year. One of the goals of the ban was to allow countries to survey sturgeon stocks and develop a management plan.
The ban was ended in March Iran was not subject to the ban but Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan were. In , CITIES banned the export of Caspian Sea caviar because the countries that produce it failed to provide adequate data to determine the numbers of sturgeon and failed to take adequate measures to protect the fish. In the U. Environmentalists encouraged people to eat caviar from farmed American paddlefish or white sturgeon.
In December , Russia and other countries bordering the Caspian Sea agreed to stop fishing caviar-producing sturgeon because the fish was close to extinction. Even with the ban repopulation would be slow because female sturgeon take so long to reach sexual maturity. Russia had already banned commercial sturgeon fishing in the Caspian in , but has been still permitting a minimal annual catch.
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