Sturgeon — Asia

“Yes, hatcheries like this can sustain the sturgeon, despite the poaching and the oil pollution. The current of the Kura extends far into the Caspian, beyond the area of oil development. If the government would support us, we would have no problem increasing the numbers of sturgeons, even under these conditions. It is something that pays for itself. With a minimal investment in a sturgeon plant, one may expect quite large returns. Oil reserves, no matter how large, are eventually used up. But fish are forever, if only you handle them reasonably.”

“Azerbaijan broked ranks with Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan on mattersof beluga management. In 1992, those countries had agreed to divide the beluga harvest in the north Caspian in proportion to how much each country spenton hatcheries, an arrangement carried forth under CITES in its division of exportquotas. In the summer of 2002, however, Azerbaijan demanded a larger share ofthe quota based on money it had spent in dredging the mouth of the Kura River.After that demand was rebuffed by the other states, Azerbaijan’s minister of environmental protection shocked the whole Caspian community with a letter to USF&Wendorsing the ESA listing of beluga. The population of beluga,” wrote the minister,needs to be restored to healthy levels of abundance with a normal age structurebefore sustainable fishing can resume.’”

“In December 2002 Katya Godunova e-mailed me a photograph that proved that at least as recently as 1997 there were giants in the waters of the earth: a crowd of men in a street in Astrakhan hauling the carcass of a beluga that dwarfed even that famous specimen [the 2,000-pound stuffed beluga at the Astrakhan museum] . . . Katya said that this fish — a little over 4,000 pounds, 21 feet and 4 inches long — had been stuffed and mounted and would be unveiled at another museum after Christmas. ‘Poachers caught this fish, or I’d rather say whale judging by its giant size,’ Katya wrote. ‘They delivered 250 kilos [550 pounds] of caviar from the fish and kept it for themselves and then phoned to the museum . . . This fish is approximately 130 years old.’”

“The end of the Soviet regime in 1991 was the next major disaster for Russian sturgeon . . . The Yeltsin administration tried to simplify them [sturgeon quotas] by making the minimum parcel 10 tonnes, at a stroke reducing the numbers of legal entrepreneurs and putting all the small-scale fishermen out of business: legal business, anyway. An immediate switch to poaching was the result, with a sophisticated blackmarket network ready to slip caviar upriver to the gangsters in their armour-plated Mercedes; all fueled by azart, that post-Communist Russian euphoria and ruthless get-rich-quick frenzy . . . Meanwhile, the state-run fisheries’ and research stations’ funding was so reduced that despite the dedicated work of committed scientists, they were almost helpless to counter the situation, despite knowing what was necessary.”

“When it was found that sturgeon did not use the fish passages they had built in the dams, they built hatcheries along the Don, Amur, Dneiper, the Volga, and eventually on a grand scale in the Caspian. Using techniques developed but never used in the nineteenth century, they released millions of fingerlings each year back into the rivers and Volga delta. A fishing moratorium in 1962 helped them to mature. The programme was incredibly successful at turning around the decline, so much so that by 1980 some 28,000 tonnes of sturgeon were harvested; almost as much as the 1900 record catch. This spectacular achievement was marred only by the discovery that no natural spawning of beluga had taken place in the Caspian for years; all the young sturgeon originated from fisheries’ stock whose genetic pool was limited.”

“Surface atomic bomb blasts that accompanied military exercises in the 1950s raised the Caspian’s levels of tritium, an enriched radioactive element, by factors of 300 to 400. Then, over the next three decades, a series of underground nuclear explosions beneath the Caspian spread radioactive fluids as the resulting chambers filled and leaked . . . In the 1980s, fish began appearing with deformed eggs, and then began displaying signs themselves of disease or deformity: missing eyes or nostrils or tails, twisted spines, degenerative muscles or organs, tumors. The sturgeon harvests fell again, down to 18,000 tons in 1990.”

“Starting in the 1930s, a series of dams were built across the Volga’s tributaries . . . In 1955 the main Volzhaskaya dam was started. It took six years and 50,000 people to build and it is three miles wide . . . When the main wall was completed in 1959, a fisheries researcher called Igor Burtsev went to admire this colossal piece of engineering. He found a seething mass of about 600,000 migrating sturgeon piled up against the dam, blocked off from 90 per cent of their spawning grounds.”

“From 1950-60, the other dams had already reduced the Caspian catch by 25 per cent. Not only were the sturgeon (in particular the beluga) now unable to spawn, but the water quality was affected first by silting which blocked many waterways and sifted out the cloudy nutrients and small creatures that the fish used to feed on, and then by pollution on a grand scale from the factories on the river banks. Heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs and dioxins were mixed with oil spillages into such a deadly cocktail that after twenty years every sturgeon egg from the Caspian tested by government scientists had abnormalities.”

“The intervention of the First World War in 1914 followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917 put paid to all of that. What that also did, crucially, was to give sturgeon stocks a seven-year reprieve. Astrakhan’s wealthy fishery owners fled, and by 1920, a mere 300 tonnes of caviar were extracted.”

“Caspian caviar production had grown from four tonnes a year in 1860 to 3,000 by 1900, this from a record sturgeon harvest of 33,000 tonnes.”

“It was a law or decree, which had begun as a spontaneous offering, by which the Ural Cossacks brought to the Tsar, every spring, the first haul of their year’s fishing . . . [T]he fish and the caviar were packed in wagons and sent direct to St Petersburg, with a Cossack deputation. On arrival, the sturgeon and the three sorts of caviar were carried into the great dining room of the Winter Palace. The Tsar received the Cossacks, and they were rewarded.”

A railway is installed between the Volga on the Caspian and the Don on yhe Azov, revolutionizing transport from the Caspian and dramatically increasing sturgeon fishing and sales.