Critically Endangered
Chinese sturgeon
Acipenser sinensis
The Chinese sturgeon (Sinosturio sinensis.
The ray-finned fish
Adult Chinese sturgeon can range between 2 and 5 m (6.6 and 16.4 ft) in total length, and weigh between 200 and 500 kg (440 and 1,100 lb), ranking them among the largest sturgeon in the world.
Range and habitat
The Chinese sturgeon is a critically endangered species native to China. It is largely dispersed over the main streams of the Yangtze River and coastal regions of Qiantang River, Minjiang River, and Pearl River. In the 1970s, an estimated 2,000 Chinese sturgeon spawned in the Yangtze River every year.
China has several conservation programmes, among them reserves specifically aimed at this species and restocking through release of juveniles in the Yangtze River.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Most sturgeon spawn in fresh water and migrate to salt water to mature. The Chinese sturgeon can be considered a large freshwater fish, although it spends part of its lifecycle in seawater, like the salmon, except Chinese sturgeon spawn multiple times throughout their lives.
The Chinese sturgeon has a habit of upstream migration. It dwells along the coasts of China's eastern areas and migrates back up rivers for propagation upon reaching sexual maturity. It has the longest migration of any sturgeon in the world, and once migrated more than 3,200 km (2,000 mi) up the Yangtze.
In crisis
The Chinese sturgeon (Sinosturio sinensis. Chinese: 中华鲟; pinyin: zhōnghuá xún) is a critically endangered member of the family Acipenseridae in the order Acipenseriformes. The Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Fisheries Sciences in Jingzhou is one agency charged with breeding sturgeon in captivity for restoring the river population before the species disappears.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Chinese 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 Chinese sturgeon, Wikidata item Q1074259. 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.
