WWF Report on Sturgeon

In News

The illegal sale of sturgeon is rampant in the lower Danube region, especially in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, according to a report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

• Danube is the second longest river in Europe after the Volga. It rises in the Black Forest mountains of western Germany and flows for some 2,850 km to its mouth on the Black Sea.

Recommendations made

• Enhanced controls of domestic trade;
• Control of CITES caviar labelling requirements;
• Improved inter-agency cooperation and coordination;
• Increased border controls;
• Use of State-of-the-art forensic analysis; and
• Conducting more and recurrent market surveys

About Sturgeon

History

• Sturgeons have existed since the time of dinosaurs, for about 200 million years. Some of the species can grow up to eight metre in length and live more than a century.
  • They are called ‘living fossils’ because their appearance has altered very little over the years.
  • Living Fossil is an organism that has remained unchanged from earlier geologic times and whose close relatives are usually extinct.
• Sturgeons are economically and culturally important in every river basin and country across their traditional range.

Habitat

• There are 27 species of sturgeons and paddlefishes distributed across the Northern hemisphere.
• While some species inhabit the only freshwater, most species are anadromous, spawning in freshwater but spending much of their life history in marine or brackish environments.
• All species are late-maturing and slow-growing and do not reproduce annually, making them slow to rebound from exploitation.

Threats

• Habitat degradation, primarily due to damming of large rivers that many migratory sturgeons use for reproduction, has been a major driver of species decline.
• Dams have restricted access to spawning habitats and altered the flow and temperature regimes required for migration and rearing.
• Estuary habitat transformation and degradation have negatively affected juvenile recruitment.
• The fish species are poached for their meat and caviar, which is considered a delicacy.

Protection status

• There are 6 species of sturgeon in the Danube River. Five of them are now listed as critically endangered.

                                                                                          Image Courtesy :WWF

Source: DTH