Iran shows growing concern about declining sturgeon stock

 

The iranian government urges the president of the Caspian Sea states to sign the Convention for the Legal Regime of the Caspian Sea, which would settle the territorial rights of each country and most of all alleviate environmental concerns for the world’s largest land-locked body of water.

Some fisherman see themselfs already as the last generation of its kind in the Caspian Region. Because of heavy pollution (sewage, oil drilling, etc.), poaching and over-fishing, the sturgeon population in that region is in free fall since the last years. Some even say, that within the next 10yrs. this ancient caviar production will come to an end. 

Iran is the only mentionable state in that region that undergoes heavy efforts in order to re-stock this endangered species without a hidden agenda (as for example Russia and Kazakhstan do with their caviar mafia and corrupt system). 

Lets hope that Teheran finds a way to convince them all and to round up the table! 

Original article on allheadlinenews.com

ZwyerCaviar LLC looking for license partners worldwide!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the successful introduction into the Swiss market last winter season, ZwyerCaviar LLC is planning its international roll-out this year. Michelin star chefs (e.g. Andreas Caminada, Horst Petermann, André Jaeger), F&B Managers of 5* Hotels (e.g. Hyatt),  luxury retail chains (e.g. Globus) and many private caviarists praise its absolut high quality caviar and its elegant-intelligent brand appearance.

After hitting the shelfs with the Black Pearl last October, containing optionally 1 or 2 tins of 125grams, ZwyerCaviar introduced the 1kg traditional tin back in December and the 30grams tin in February. Soon it will ad its new product to its already successful line-up: the 10grams tasting portion “TENTATIONS!”  

Interested parties, looking to participate on this ultra-premium family brand, pls contact Mr. Alexander Zwyer under:

az@zwyercaviar.com  or  at +41713334000

 

ZwyerCaviar - The Caspian Legacy

All sturgeon fishing in the Tennessee waters soon to be banned?

 

“Tennessee Tech University professor and U.S. Geological Survey researcher Phil Bettoli and colleagues accompanied commercial fishermen in Tennessee during the 2007 fishing season and estimated that hundreds of large, mature pallid sturgeon have been illegally harvested in recent years for their eggs, which are highly valued as caviar, according to a recently released report that will appear in February in the Journal of Applied Ichthyology.

“Researchers who have studied pallid sturgeon and sought ways to prevent the species from going extinct have long suspected that illegal fishing was undermining government efforts to save the species,” explained Bettoli.

Commercial fishermen are not necessarily targeting pallid sturgeon, one of the largest and most primitive fish plying the Mississippi River basin. Instead, they target the smaller, more numerous shovelnose sturgeon, a closely related species that can be legally harvested for its caviar.

Unprocessed shovelnose sturgeon eggs fetch more than $100 per pound, and the processed caviar is subsequently sold for $12-21 per ounce.

However, the two species share some of the same habitats and are notoriously difficult to tell apart in the field. Definitive identification requires DNA analysis or sophisticated statistical models to analyze external anatomy.

Bettoli and colleagues at Tennessee Tech and Southern Illinois University do not claim that pallid sturgeon face extinction in Mississippi River waters. But they did publish conclusions that could affect the shovelnose sturgeon caviar fisheries, which in Tennessee can range as high as $200,000 a year in value.

“Allowing the harvest of pallid sturgeon to continue is inconsistent with the long running, extensive recovery efforts undertaken by state and federal agencies stretching from Louisiana to Montana, costing millions of dollars annually,” said Bettoli.

In addition, the researchers got a glimpse of a poorly documented phenomenon: ghost nets. These lost nets keep catching and killing fish for years and have been recognized as a serious threat to sturgeon recovery efforts along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Tennessee sturgeon fishermen admitted that losing nets is not uncommon when fishing the Mississippi River.

Based on these and other findings, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to step in and close all sturgeon fishing in the Tennessee waters of the Mississippi River under the Similarity of Appearance clause of the Endangered Species Act.

“The pressure to act is increasing because the worldwide demand for caviar is high (as are the prices the eggs fetch), domestic and foreign supplies of caviar are shrinking, and pallid sturgeon are still a long way from ever making it off the endangered species list,” said Bettoli.”

 

Article taken from underwatertimes.com

 

Guardian of the Fish With the Golden Eggs

 

“Dr. Doukakis is on a mission to protect the sturgeon. 

Her informal manner echoes the way she talks about these fish. She refers to them affectionately as “these guys” and laments the fact that they “got whacked” by overfishing. But the informality cloaks a depth of knowledge.

Dr. Doukakis, who alternates between an apartment in Hamilton Heights and a house in Ulster County, has been associated with the museum since 1996. It may be fitting that she is doing this work in the heart of the city that is perhaps the nation’s leading consumer of caviar, buying several tons a year.

The fish that is the focus of her professional endeavors has a special status in the conservation world. Sturgeon, about 25 species of fish from one family, first appeared in the fossil record 200 million years ago and are generally huge: In some species, a sturgeon can live past 100 and grow to 2,000 pounds. To spawn, they swim upstream from seas into rivers; their favorite is the 1,500-mile Ural River, which runs from the Ural Mountains in Russia through Kazakhstan to the Caspian Sea.

The lure of illegal caviar drives the black market: At $5,000 to $10,000 per kilo of beluga caviar, one beluga sturgeon could be worth $50,000.

In 2007, several Kazakh scientists came to New York and met with Dr. Doukakis and other American biologists in an effort to try to save their sturgeon from the sorry fate the fish met in New York. Two species found in the Hudson River, the Atlantic sturgeon and the short-nosed sturgeon, were once plentiful, perhaps because their meat was unpopular.

By the 1850s, fishermen were hawking sturgeon meat under the name Albany beef. Enterprising merchants shipped American caviar off to an expanding European market, while New York bartenders offered free caviar sandwiches, hoping that the salty taste would prompt people to drink more alcohol. By 1900, the populations of both species crashed. Still, the demand continued.

Flash forward a century. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Doukakis, working with Rob DeSalle, a curator at the museum, and Vadim Birstein, a Russian biologist, developed a method of identifying caviar by its DNA sequence. They also designed a market study that involved buying tins of caviar locally and analyzing the DNA to see if the species inside matched the label.

They found that a quarter of the caviar sold in New York was mislabeled, with the eggs of endangered species for sale in Manhattan, often unbeknown to both buyer and seller. The study, published in 1998, contributed to the imposition of trade restrictions by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

The sale of caviar from the wild beluga sturgeon, which is among the endangered species, is banned in the United States. But because beluga caviar can still be found in stores and online, a decade later, Dr. Doukakis and her colleagues are on the hunt again.

At the museum’s lab, officially known as the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, Dr. Doukakis is working with Anna Rothschild, a research technician, to replicate the original study, with funding from the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook, Dr. Doukakis’s employer. The goal is to determine whether international conservation efforts have reduced the amount of endangered species’ caviar sold in New York and online.

For the past year, they have been visiting high-end food shops, posing as party planners.

“If anybody asked, we had our story down,” Ms. Rothschild said.

Because Dr. Doukakis is widely known in the caviar world, she uses colleagues’ credit cards to buy caviar online. In one of the lab’s ultracold freezers sat a box bearing the business address of Ms. Rothschild’s father, who works in the music industry.

After washing the eggs from the caviar samples, Ms. Rothschild breaks them down to DNA strands, which are then read by a laser that identifies the DNA sequence. Using a computer program, she compares the sequence of a new sample with samples in a database.

Neither woman much likes caviar, but because fraudulent caviar is often poorly processed or spoiled, tasting is part of the job, and not always a pleasant part.

“You’ve had the paddlefish caviar, right?” Dr. Doukakis asked her technician one day recently as the two women inspected vials of frozen caviar in the lab. “It just tastes like mud.”

Their report will appear toward the end of the year. While Dr. Doukakis predicts that it will show that New Yorkers are buying less illegal caviar than in the past, over all, the picture for sturgeon grows bleaker, largely because the international black market persists. “These fish continue to be pummeled,” Dr. Doukakis said.

In the course of her research, she has visited four of the fishing nations on the Caspian Sea — Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan — and spent three fishing seasons on the Ural River.

But her work in the city presses on. The other day, Dr. Doukakis sat in the lab at a blond-wood table examining photographs of fishing expeditions on the river. Across Central Park, sunset bronzed the buildings of the East Side.

The work can be difficult, she acknowledged. “But,” she added, “I’m pretty convinced I’ll end up working on sturgeon for the rest of my life.”

 

Article taken from nytimes.com

Paddlefish Eggs Sold as Caviar Funding Research

 

On the 27th of March I posted an article about the convicted Thomas Jerry Nix, Jr. for participating in a conspiracy to engage in illegal commercial fishing for American paddlefish and to illegally take paddlefish roe and process them into caviar. (Go to article: http://www.caviarist.com/?p=795)

 

Article:

“Now, on Newson6 I found this article about a governmental research project, financed through the commercialisation of paddlefish roe. If a citizen tries to make a living with the natural ressources, its a crime. But if the government steps in, than its suddenly legal. So it seems…

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation is working with fishermen to study one of Oklahoma’s largest, and strangest, fish.

Paddlefish cruise the bottoms of Oklahoma lakes feeding on plankton.

They’re being harvested for their eggs, or roe, which is selling on the international caviar market for 100 dollars a pound.

“It’s very expensive to manage these populations,” said Oklahoma Department of Wildlife and Conservation Northeast Region Fisheries Biologist Brent Gordon.  “This way our fishermen are bringing in product, it kind of invests them as part of the data collection.  They bring it to us, we fillet that out very nice, return it to them and if it has any eggs in it we collect those out and sell them on the open market.”

The money collected from the sale of the caviar is used to fund the ongoing research operation.

Watch the video to see Dick Faurot catch two Paddlefish when Wildlife officers took us out ‘snagging’ this week.”

Found on: Newson6.com

Bono drowns in caviar-filled bath!!!

 

“Bono R.I.P.

Shocking news is breaking that world-famous lead singer from U2, Paul Hewson a.k.a. Bono, was found dead this morning in a penthouse suite of a hotel in Amsterdam.

At 10:00 this morning  staff of the Intercontinental Amstel hotel in Amsterdam made the decision to enter Bono’s penthouse suite despite the “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the door. The decision was taken after Bono’s missed an appointment to meet his new Dutch accountant to discuss important taxation affairs.

Upon entering the room staff were shocked to discover Bono submerged in a bath of caviar. Urgent attempts were made to revive Mr. Hewson but the emergency CPR attempts were hindered by the large quantities of Almas Beluga caviar which were blocking his windpipe.

 

Authorities arrived on the scene and do not currently suspect foul play, however enquiries are being made as to the whereabouts of the supplier of such a large quantity of Almas Beluga caviar, which famously retails for £25,000 per kilo, and samples of the caviar have been sent to the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut in the Hague for testing to rule out any possibility of poisoning.

Bono’s body has been removed to the city morgue and it is expected that cause of death will be either asphyxiation or the rarely seen ‘indulgence toxicity’,  however it has been advised that no statement on this will be given until a full toxicity test has been undertaken.

 

Hendrickje Brinkerhoff, a hair stylist in an exclusive salon a near to the International Amstel, said this afternoon that she had been delighted to serve Mr. Hewson on a couple of occasions recently. “I think it’s really sad,” Ms. Brinkerhoff said. “He seemed like a very happy man and had said that the people in Holland were so much better dressed than the Irish that he knew. He made me laugh when he said that but I wasn’t sure how he would take me giving him advice on his own fashion sense.” She later added “It’s funny, he wouldn’t take his sunglasses off even when I was washing his hair.”

Outside the Intercontinental Amstel hotel a sizeable crowd had gathered and many people expressed shock at Mr. Hewson’s death. Rykaard Groesbeck, a local artist, said, “That’s terrible. It seems such a cruel way to go, and what a waste of such expensive caviar!”

Geertje Schermerhorn, a student who was passing by, said, “That’s awful, and I was only listening to ‘Shiny Happy People’ this morning. The world must be much less happy now.”

As news of Mr. Hewson’s death spreads across the Internet, the Chief of Police (Hoofdcommissaris) has issued a fairly terse summary of the death: “On Wednesday the 1st of July 2009 at approximately 1000 hours, in the centrum precinct, police responded to the InterContinental Amstel at Professor Tuppelin 1 and found a M/W/48 unconscious. The victim was pronounced DOA upon removal from a bath filled with Almas Beluga caviar. Investigation continues.”

U2’s manager and other band members have so far been unavailable for comment.”

 

Obviously another 1st of April prank…!

The article taken from http://alex.leonard.ie/2009/04/01/shock-news-bono-drowns-in-caviar-filled-bath/

List of current caviar producers worldwide

 

Because of its high quality standard, premium price category and its very scarce availability, not everybody can fill their gourmet palates with caviar from Uruguay. There are more caviar players in the world. Most of them not getting the best feedbacks, but as it’s a very young and promising industry their is room for improvement for everybody…

So, here I pass on the actual list (CITES) for anyone who shows interest in this matter.

090210_cites_registered_caviarplayers