Beluga Sturgeon

The Beluga Sturgeon, although being discovered in the 1950’s has been on earth since the Triassic period. Which is about 245 million years ago, of course the beluga sturgeon isn’t the same as it was 245 million years ago. The sturgeon has survived since then evolving to become a massive fish with a hard boney exterior armor plates. The sturgeon can commonly be found on the coast of North America and Eurasia. What makes this fish incredibly interesting is that it can live for more than 100 years and range up to 12 feet long. After learning that I didn’t think much else could surprise me about this fish, but then I found the world record for the biggest sturgeon caught. The biggest sturgeon ever caught weighed 3,463 pounds and was 24 feet long. This blew my mind, I wonder how they caught a fish of this size and how long it would’ve taken. I thought catching tuna was hard, this must’ve blow that straight out of the water.

I chose to write about this incredible animal because it is now critically endangered according to multiple world wide red list. According to the IUCN “18 species of sturgeon from all over Europe and Asia and found that all were threatened.” Also according to the same organization the other 27 species of sturgeon are on the red list labeled as critically endangered, like I previously mentioned. Sturgeons are commonly illegally captured for the wild caviar they can produce from their eggs. Which is big money in most Asian countries. Lastly the sturgeon around the world suffer from overfishing and destruction of habitats from pollution forcing the fish to live in unhealthy environments.

Sources:

  1. https://www.iucn.org/content/sturgeon-more-critically-endangered-any-other-group-species
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beluga_(sturgeon)
  3. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uqhqoZqzivY/maxresdefault.jpghttps://i.ytimg.com/vi/uqhqoZqzivY/maxresdefault.jpg

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