This is long but I thought it was interesting.
The "CSI" of Endangered Species Protects Sturgeon
2/3/2004 6:01:00 AM
Copyright ©2004 San Jose Mercury News. All Rights Reserved.
As swank restaurants nationwide serve up beluga, osetra or sevruga caviar to well-heeled diners with sumptuous tastes, forensic scientist Dyan Straughan hunches over a lab table here, transferring one glistening black egg after another into a tiny vial. A drop of liquid enzyme is squirted in so that Straughan can extract each egg's DNA to determine what type of sturgeon it came from and whether it was legally caught and labeled. The aim? Protecting a fish that has existed since prehistoric times from becoming extinct because of rampant poaching. The work is paying off: 70 percent of the biggest U.S. caviar dealers are being held on smuggling and forgery charges. But the harm already inflicted is catastrophic. In this quaint town known for its Shakespeare festival, Straughan works at the only forensic wildlife laboratory in the world. Using the same methods that can link rapists and murderers to crimes, the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory identifies the species, cause of death and perpetrators who have harmed creatures on the verge of disappearing from the Earth. It is the "CSI" of endangered species. And its victims include wild sturgeons, whose rare, salty, buttery eggs are so valuable that they have become the object of worldwide black-market smuggling as ruthless as the illegal drug trade. At the urging of environmentalists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to decide as soon as this week whether to declare beluga sturgeons an endangered species. That status would end all importation of beluga caviar into the United States, and would be the first time such a classification has been given to such a commercially lucrative species. Whether the declaration would exacerbate the illegal trade problem is anyone's guess. "It's a continuing battle," said Edward Grace, special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Chicago. "We figure out ways people are smuggling, then they just find other ways. I don't know how the problem could get any worse. . . . But it could end up like Prohibition, where everything just goes underground." Caspian sturgeons suffer The situation is especially dire for beluga sturgeons in the Caspian Sea. An enormous fish that takes as long as 25 years to reach sexual maturity and reproduces as infrequently as every four years, the beluga has the biggest, most valued eggs of any sturgeon. Once salted and turned into caviar, the eggs can sell for $75 an ounce. Caviar sellers can run afoul of the law in two ways: The fish might have been poached, or the caviar can be fraudulently labeled, with one type of fish eggs passed off as another. Thanks to efforts by the lab and federal agents over the past four years, $121 million worth of illegal caviar has been seized and more than 30 individuals from 13 U.S. companies have been imprisoned on smuggling and fraud charges, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Grace said. The lab, which once analyzed 100 shipments of caviar a year, now sees half that. Yet that news is not necessarily cause to rejoice. "The cases have dropped off because there are so few sturgeon now," said Steven Fain, chief of the lab's DNA team. "No females were landed in the Volga this past year. The fishery is tanked." Fishermen in the Caspian Sea -- the source of most caviar -- filled less than half of this season's beluga caviar quota of 19,470 pounds, said Ellen Pikitch, executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science at the University of Miami. Equally disturbing is the fact that since 1997, much of the mislabeling encountered by the lab has involved cheap North American paddlefish eggs being passed off as pricy Russian caviar, Fain said. It indicates that poachers, faced with a dwindling beluga population, have turned to wild North American sturgeons and paddlefish, which number so few that most are protected by state laws. Such subterfuge didn't always exist. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fishing grounds of the Caspian Sea were rigorously policed, and hatchery fish replenished the stock. After the 1991 breakup, many of those efforts collapsed and a black market took hold. "The illegal drug trade is larger, but the methods, motives and operating procedures in the illegal caviar trade are exactly the same," Grace said. Much of that trade transpires in the United States, the largest importer of beluga caviar. Caviar mafia's muscle Calling itself the Brotherhood of the Reeds, the caviar mafia is named for the grassy area along the banks of the Caspian where sturgeons spawn. The brotherhood is thought to be behind the murders of maritime inspectors in Russia, Grace said, including the bombing of an apartment building that killed 67 people. Poachers and smugglers are willing to go to such lengths because the payoff is high in relation to the risk. While a cocaine smuggler might get a 10- to 20-year sentence in the United States for bringing in a kilo of the drug, a caviar smuggler bringing in an equal amount of beluga eggs might make the same profit but face a fraction of the prison time. As sturgeon populations have continued to diminish, though, fines and prison sentences have increased. Two years ago, a Maryland caviar importer, U.S. Caviar & Caviar Ltd., was caught passing off tons of North American paddlefish eggs as Russian caviar. The company owner was sentenced to 41 months in prison and his company fined $10.4 million, the most ever in a wildlife trafficking case. DNA testing Without DNA testing, cases like these couldn't be prosecuted, Grace said, because even caviar experts are often hard-pressed to distinguish one type of egg from another. Each time inspectors come across a suspicious load of caviar, in a warehouse or in a suitcase, a sample is sent to the lab. DNA is extracted from the eggs and then selected DNA regions are amplified as rainbow-like bands of color on a computer screen to match against DNA samples of known breeds of sturgeons. The technology is not always perfect when it comes to hybrid sturgeons, the offspring of two species. "There has been criticism that the testing is not always sensitive enough," the Pew Institute's Pikitch said. "When there's a similarity in the genotype, and you only test for that one genotype, you could come up with an erroneous conclusion. As a result, someone could be charged with catching a sturgeon from the wrong area when it was really caught in the right area." Lab director Ken Goddard said that presently the lab is only able to test the mitochondrial DNA of a fish, which is passed down from its mother, not its nuclear DNA, which is composed of DNA from both the mother and father. But caviar producers, he said, can easily comply with the law by listing both species on their permits when the eggs are from a hybrid. Although the lab tries to turn around results within nine days, some caviar sellers complain that the holdup is a hardship. But Eve Vega of Petrossian Inc. criticized those sellers for not bringing in shipments far enough in advance to allow for potential seizure and sampling. "I don't have a problem with Fish and Wildlife taking the time to check, especially during the holidays when so much is imported," said Vega, executive director of American operations for Petrossian in New York. The company, which sells about 50 tons of caviar annually to restaurants, hotels and cruise ships worldwide, is among the trade's largest sellers. "Anyone serious about importing caviar just has to do their homework." For more news or to subscribe, please visit
http://www.bayarea.com
[ 02-04-2004, 11:02 AM: Message edited by: David Johnson ]
The "CSI" of Endangered Species Protects Stur
Adofish
Really sad 
Linear Mode
