Critically Endangered
Persian sturgeon
Acipenser persicus
Persian sturgeon is an animal in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser persicus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
The animal
Persian sturgeon is an animal in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser persicus.
Range and habitat
Individual specimens are found in the North Caspian, western part of the Middle and South Caspian. It is found in the Caspian Sea and to a lesser extent the Black Sea and ascends certain rivers to spawn, mainly the Volga, Kura, Araks and Ural Rivers. It is heavily fished for its flesh and its roe and is limited in its up-river migrations by damming of the rivers.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
At approximately age 2–3 years many feed on crabs or fish, and finally in adulthood the Persian sturgeon consumption is primarily fish. Spawning occurs at different times for the different rivers.
There is spawning in the Volga river from late July to early August, in the Krua river from April to mid-September and in the Ural river from June to July. Other than at times of spawning the sturgeon is a bottom dweller in the mud or sand. The threats faced by this fish include excessive fishing with the removal of immature fish before they have bred, damming of the rivers, loss of spawning areas and water pollution.
In crisis
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed the fish as critically endangered and has suggested that the increased provision of hatcheries could be of benefit. When fisherman take the sturgeon out of the sea prematurely they disrupt the ecological cycle by taking out immature fish and decreasing the spawning population.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Persian 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 Persian sturgeon, Wikidata item Q499866. 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.
