Critically Endangered
Bastard sturgeon
Acipenser nudiventris
Bastard sturgeon is a ray-finned fish in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser nudiventris, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Range and habitat
No country pin is stored for Bastard sturgeon on this catalog. That is a missing field, not proof the animal has no range.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Huso nudiventris typically feed on other animals near the benthos among them: insect larvae, mollusks, crustaceans, and other smaller fish. Because they travel from saltwater to freshwater to spawn, they often live nearby estuaries.
Migration to freshwaters for deposition of eggs occurs during spring between the months of March and May, and fall between October and November. The young Huso nudiventris can live in freshwater for years following birth prior to traveling to the sea, though many migrate to the sea soon after birth.
In crisis
Formerly abundant in the Black, Aral and Caspian seas, its range is now primarily limited to the Ural River (in Russia and Kazakhstan), with possible relict populations in the Rioni River in Georgia and the Safid Rud in Iran. One of the most established populations is one in Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan, well outside its natural range, where they were introduced in the 1930s for commercial purposes. A decline in the abundance of Huso nudiventris has been reported due to overfishing and damming, that have led to limitations placed on fishing for bastard sturgeon in areas such as the Ural River.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Bastard sturgeon is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Bastard sturgeon, Wikidata item Q846857. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
