Extinct in the Wild
Dabry's sturgeon
Acipenser dabryanus
Dabry's sturgeon is a ray-finned fish in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser dabryanus, recorded as Extinct in the Wild.
Appearance
Its body is blue-gray above and yellowish white on the belly, with five rows of scutes. The head is triangular and the snout is long with the mouth located on the underside. It is endemic to China and today restricted to the Yangtze River basin, but was also recorded from the Yellow River basin in the past.
This sturgeon has been known to reach 2.5 m (8.2 ft) in length, but it is usually much smaller.
Range and habitat
Dabry's sturgeon (Sinosturio dabryanus), also known as the Yangtze sturgeon, Changjiang sturgeon and river sturgeon, is a fish in the sturgeon family, Acipenseridae.
Three days later, on 16 April, the first wild hatchlings had been spotted, proving that reintroduction of the sturgeon to the wild is possible.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It feeds on aquatic plants, invertebrates, and small fish. This species is potamodromous, taking part in a migration, but never leaving fresh water.
It spawns in the upper Yangtze, mainly during March and April, and sometimes around November and December. Males spawn each year, but most females do not.
In crisis
Its populations declined drastically, and since 1988, it was designated an endangered species on the Chinese Red List in Category I and commercial harvest was banned. It has been officially declared extinct in the wild by the IUCN as of 21 July 2022. The main causes of its drastic decline include overfishing, among them the overharvesting of juveniles.
Thousands of individuals have been released into the Yangtze basin, but are apparently not breeding. Nevertheless, this restocking may be the only effort preventing the extinction of the species.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Dabry's sturgeon is Extinct in the Wild 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 Dabry's sturgeon, Wikidata item Q589039. 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.
