The global efforts to curtail the fishing and exporting of caviar from the Caspian Sea – the historical center of sturgeon fisheries – have squeezed supplies and driven up prices. Overfishing, pollution and poaching had depleted wild populations.
But there is good news.
There is a shift to aquaculture and captive breeding of sturgeons in an increasing number of countries all over the world. Farms are moving toward sustainable techniques.
The trend has created business opportunities for sturgeon farms, even in unlikely places like the United Arab Emirates and South Korea.
Some caviar producers have tried making an incision in the fish’s belly to collect the roe in a piscine version of a Caesarean section. In recent years, fisheries biologists in countries including Iran and the United States have developed techniques that are less invasive and stressful. Instead of poking the fish with a screwdriver to find out whether they are ready to spawn, farms now can use a biopsy technique or ultrasound.
When Han Sang-hun in Chungju, South Korea, brought 200 sturgeons on a chartered plane from Russia in 1997, South Korean officials regarded the alien fish with a level of suspicion that the owner of a fish pond might reserve for an invasion of sharks. (The sturgeon, because of its prickly looks, is called the armored shark in Korean.)
The 200 sturgeon multiplied. Now there are 50,000.
In South Korea, when the rich talk about gourmet food, they still think mainly of raw fish or the choicest cuts of beef. Mr. Han has been trying to change that, sponsoring haute caviar-and-Champagne clubs.
After 15 years of dedicating himself to his sturgeons, he compared his farm to a factory with “50,000 workers who can’t speak or form a labor union.”
“The fish will live long after I am gone. I am thinking about who’s going to take care of them when I am no longer here,” Mr. Han said. “Raising sturgeon, I have learned a lot about time, human mortality and environmental preservation.”
Source: New York Times, May 6
Good for Mr Han! I admire his noble sense of purpose: “50,000 workers who can’t speak or form a labor union”…
I googled “sturgeon” and learned many things. They are BIG, and endangered. They don’t have proper scales, and hence are controversial in orthodox and conservative Jewish circles: only fish with scales may be eaten, and sturgeon have “ganoid” scales whereas only ctenoid and cycloid scales are permitted.
Google is informative on the crucial distinctions amongst these types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(anatomy)
The permitted cycloids and ctenoids are two forms of leptoid scales, which “are found on higher-order bony fish” (my emphasis).
And some moths and butterflies have scales, which provide colouration.
Some good news at last!
Fish farming seems the only sensible to feed people all the fish they want. David Suzuki doesn’t like it though.
Google Noel Coward’s song about caviar comes from virgin sturgeon.
Just FYI – I live on the Sunshine Coast in BC. In Sechelt there is a sturgeon fish farm operation which is producing excellent caviar – though some local people have some objections to their efforts. The Fraser River sturgeon is a wondrous and ancient fish, and is (of course) endangered from past overfishing and current pollution. Here is a link to an article about this operation: http://urbandiner.ca/2011/10/04/is-the-world-ready-for-white-sturgeon-caviar-from-the-fraser-river/
And here is a link to one of the many issues with salmon farming in prime sites in the Pacific…http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/05/17/bc-salmon-farm-quarantined-lethal-virus.html
Inspired by this spate of links, I went looking for the song Fred Langan alludes to. Found a splendid song — “Caviar comes from virgin sturgeon; Virgin sturgeon’s a very fine dish. Very few sturgeon are ever virgin, That’s why caviar’s a very rare dish.” etc. — with many versions, many verses, some of them quite ‘naughty’. But no indication that Noel Coward had anything to do with it. (However he did say “Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade”.)
One link for the song is here: http://www.horntip.com/html/songs_sorted_by_name/with_music/v/virgin_sturgeon/caviar_comes_from_the_virgin_sturgeon.htm
The song is associated with one Charley Drew, though it’s not clear if he’s its progenitor or just sang it a lot. Googling Charley Drew, one finds a Wikipedia article on Charles R. Drew, a black American, er, surgeon. His is an interesting story!