Critically Endangered
Starry sturgeon
Acipenser stellatus
Starry sturgeon is a ray-finned fish in the family Acipenseridae (order Acipenseriformes) — Acipenser stellatus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
It is a slim-bodied fish easily distinguished from other sturgeons by its long, thin and straight snout that makes up roughly 25% of its total length. A row of five small barbels lies closer to the mouth than to the tip of the snout. The scales on the lateral line number between thirty and forty and these features distinguish this fish from the Russian sturgeon (H. Gueldenstaedtii).
The starry sturgeon reaches about 220 cm (7.2 ft) in length and weighs up to 80 kg (180 lb).
Range and habitat
The starry sturgeon can be found in coastal, sea, and estuarine environments. Even so, during spring spawn season, the species is known to migrate to rivers with heavy currents and have a preference for stone-filled river bottoms. If a river is not an optimal spawn habitat, sturgeon have been recorded to reside in flooded river banks with sandy ground.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
This fish is anadromous and moves upriver into shallow waters to spawn during spring and winter. Both must reproduce under optimal hydrological conditions in their spawn habitat to ensure the highest success rate of egg survival.
Spawning sturgeon appears at depths up to 5 m (16.4 ft) on the stone ground of riverbeds with a preferred water flow velocity of >1 m/s (2.2 mph). This allows efficient juvenile migration from spawn site to sea in order to distribute throughout the bodies of water.
In crisis
It is native to coastal and basin waters of the Black, Azov, Caspian and Aegean seas, but it has been extirpated from the last and it is predicted that the remaining natural population will follow soon due to overfishing. It is considered critically endangered by the IUCN and international trade in this species (among them its caviar) is restricted by CITES. The starry sturgeon species is threatened by habitat loss, overfishing, introduction of unfamiliar pathogens, and increased competition from non-native sturgeon species.
The species is believed to have undergone a loss of 95% of its population in three generations. Illegal fishing is a major threat to the survival of this species.
Starry 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 Starry sturgeon, Wikidata item Q739541. 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.
