Caviar for dogs

 

Nothing against the lifestyle of the super rich. But there’s a limit for everything. Not so much for the guys at beveryhillscaviar.com. They are offering ‘caviar’ (actually its salmon roe) for dogs…  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Delicious gourmet treats for your dog. Discover your pets favorite new treat. Dogs love caviar so much that they leave the biscuit behind. Famous among celebrity clients, this caviar duo will be your pets favorite.

Your dog will surely love you forever after dining on this generous gourmet feast. This makes an ideal birthday gift for your dog. Celebrities and royalty throughout history have fed this elitist food to their loved ones and dogs.”

 

To make your pampered puppy happy

Caviar production side financing research costs

 

 

 

 

 

This is a good example of getting independency. If you are running a marine laboratory and its costly research costs are giving you a headache, then why not breeding sturgeons by yourself and selling their high-valued roe on the market in order to support the institutional costs?

And that’s what Mote, a marine laboratory based in Florida, is doing since 1997. Breeding sturgeon. And since 2006 selling caviar from the russian and siberian sturgeon. This seems to be a helping hand for this independently run and nonprofit lab. It is active in the field of aquacultural research and has an education programm and even an aquarium to offer.

Great job!

 

For further infos, see:

- this video on youtube, and

- their official website

24 karat Gold ‘Caviar’

 

Inventions that the world doesnt need…?

Beverlyhillscaviar.com offers an imitation of caviar made out of gold flakes, white wine and lemon (so they say). Surely ideal to decorate sea food and sweets…Pricetag on a 2.6oz jar: 145USD.

See also this (almost funny!) interview on metacafe.com with the owners of lonestarcaviar.com and beverlyhillscaviar.com. You might tell your potential clients that all fish eggs fall under the ‘caviar’ category. But I highly recommend you to do that only in the US!

Bill, Beluga is ‘just as good as American Caviar’? From which lonely star does this fact come from? And what the heck is a ‘black sturgeon’? Just the oposite of the US ‘white sturgeon’ maybe?

Caviar dealer appeals sentence in smuggling case, seeks new trial

 

“Days after caviar purveyor Max Moghaddam and his company Bemka Corp. were sentenced Feb. 25 in U.S. District Court for exporting American paddlefish roe without permits, he filed an appeal and is seeking a new trial.

Moghaddam, who maintains his innocence in a prepared statement sent to Gourmet News, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, fined $100,000 and ordered to serve three years probation. Bemka, which operates under the name Bemka House of Caviar and Fine Food, was sentenced to pay a criminal fine of $200,000 and four years probation. About $122,000 worth of American paddlefish roe was seized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Moghaddam and his company Bemka Corp. of Fort Lauderdale, were found guilty by a federal jury Dec. 4, 2008, for their involvement in conspiracy, false labeling of export shipments and the illegal export of the internationally protected fish roe during the period from July 2005 through April 2007.

Since 1992, American paddlefish has been listed for protection under the international treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. More than 170 countries cooperate in the enforcement of the provisions of CITES.

It is illegal to export the American paddlefish roe without CITES permits, and while Moghaddam and Bemka had obtained CITES permits in the past, there was not one on file for the shipment in question, noted Brian Roland, special agent with U.S. Fish and Wildlife office of law enforcement.

According to the USFWS, the American paddlefish was falsely described on shipping invoices and customs documents as bowfin roe.

In a March 3 statement sent to Gourmet News, Moghaddam maintains there was a mistake on the part of the export department. In the July 2008 issue of Gourmet News, Moghaddam said the charges stem from an April 2007 sample shipment to the European Seafood Expo. Admitting the paddlefish roe was accidentally mislabeled as bowfin roe, he said he knows every container is checked, and that anyone could tell the difference between the light to dark gray paddlefish roe and the black bowfin roe.

Roland said “the evidence presented at trial showed that the paddlefish roe Bemka received had the paddlefish label removed and bowfin labels had been applied.”

Moghaddam plead not guilty at the four-day trial that started Dec. 1, 2008.”

Article taken from Gourmetnews.com (registration necessary!)

Read older blogpost about the ‘Bemka-trial’

 

 

 

 

 

Bemka House of Caviar and Fine Foods

 

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

Another sturgeon symposium in 2009

 

There will be a (amongst other fish species) sturgeon symposium this August being held in Nashville (!).

Let me just pass on the invitation of Kenneth Sulak in his own words, sent to me as a commentary (thx for sharing, Kenneth!):

 

“The North American Chapter of WSCS is also organizing and hosting a sturgeon symposium this August at the American Fisheries Society annual national meeting in Nashville (details on the AFS webpage). The focus will be on how individual North American sturgeons and paddlefish are doing, and what the primary science questions are now and into the future. As a member of the symposium committee, let me confirm that we welcome and encourage culturists and caviar producers to join NAC-WSCS, attend the symposium in Nashville (and/or in China), and actively participate in advancing sturgeon research and conservation. Visit the WSCS webpage for more on our mission, and opportunities to join, get involved, and get access to several major sturgeon publications available through the society.”

THE HUNTING PARTY – Cracking down on illegal caviar trade

Police Departments start creating their own special units to fight against organised crime syndicates who profit from illegal caviar trade.

 

USA

An interesting story is wrapped around the paddlefish in the US. A fish which is actually not a sturgeon but a close relative. The Oklahoma police observed that russian poachers living in New York and New Jersey are taking advantage of the fact that the US is tightening import permits on sturgeon eggs and did even impose a ban on beluga caviar back in 2006. This made the native paddlefish a new target for the illegal caviar traders. Or as Larry Manering, the law enforcment chief of the Wildlife Department in Oklahoma, puts it: “This is a multibillion- dollar business, and we’ve got the fish and they know it!”

So, if his unit has a poacher in their net, the poacher will face a fine of 1’000USD first. On the second run it will get costier (25’000USD) and the delinquent goes behind bars for at least 1 year.

To read original article.

 

UK

Another hunting party against illegal caviar traders is in the UK. The Brits placed their best man for this job, so it seems. Meet Inspector Nevin Hunter. Mr. Hunter and his 20-strong unit have the licence to seize caviar of any restaurant and gourmet store which do not have suficient trading documents. Chefs and alike should start to think about their own unoficial caviar canals, if they dont want to face prosecution and heavy fines.

 

This unit was set up as part of international moves to fight against illegal caviar trade. And it shows more and more that responsible authorities are putting more thoughts into this matter and get more seriously. Sturgeon poaching and trading with (or just buying!) illegal caviar is not considered a small crime anymore, but an iresponsible act that needs to and will be punished severly.

 

May the hunt begin!

 

Read original article.

Read an article about restaurants being already swooped by the caviar squad in London.

Aquafarming: Master switch to solve all the problems? (2nd part)

It’s all about remote control! Previously I posted an article about remote controlled fish cages and it’s challenges.

Now, let’s climb up a level (or two) and raise the question: How do you feed fish (meant for human consumption) that aren’t in a tank but in the open ocean? Obviously, this sounds silly at first glance. But researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole are working on what they hope is an even better solution to conventional aquafarming in general and to the fancy machinery (‘remote controlled fish cages’) posted before. It’s about a new method and the magic word behind it is: acoustic ranching.

It’s about how to train fish to respond to a kind of dinner bell after being let out into the wild open sea. It’s about conditioning. It’s about Pavlov’s dogs. Mr. Scott Lindell is a scientist, who has been training the fish to associate the sound with food – making it a hell easier for men to harvest them.  Or as Mr. Lindell puts it: “it’s like remote controlled fish!”

A ‘sound stimuli’ is a low-pitched hum, virtually inaudible to the human ear, but clear as a – well, dinner bell to the fish. Current tests are undergoing right now. It involves a 10 meter wide mesh-covered structure, which is secured to the seabed of Buzzard’s Bay. It’s the temporary home of about four thousand black sea bass. When the research team first began the experiment, the fish didn’t associate the tone with food. But they’ve since caught on. Today, when these big kids play the tone, the fishes come in hordes. At least within this experimental surrounding it seems to work. But what about in the real world?

During the month of October the research team will open the dome to let the fish out to swim in open water. Their hope lies on the memory of these black sea bass, that when they will emit the tone the fish return to feed. If at least half of the four thousand sea bass return, they’ll deem the project a success.

The experiment should finish sometime in late October – now. Let’s hope for a very positive conclusion. Let’s hope for the master switch to solve all the problems aquafarming – today’s best way for human fish consumption – fights today. And maybe a better way to rescue/repopulate sturgeon stocks worldwide!

 

Stay tuned for more!

 

Related articles:

- WBUR.org

- WCAI FM

- Patriotledger.com

- Spiegel.de (german article)

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