Beluga sturgeon

Where does the beluga sturgeon live?

Home: The Caspian and Black Seas and the big rivers that flow into them.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine.

Conservation status from the IUCN: critically endangered.

The short profile

Fully grown: commonly 1.4–3.3 m long. It weighs about 100 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A beluga sturgeon belongs to a family of fish that was already swimming when dinosaurs were alive, and it still looks the part. Instead of scales it wears five rows of bony plates called scutes, and much of its skeleton is cartilage rather than bone, the same springy stuff as your ears. Under its long snout hang four barbels that it drags over the seabed to find fish, molluscs and crabs. Young belugas start on small animals in the mud and only turn to hunting fish once they are about ten centimetres long. Adults grow slowly and breed late: a female may be more than sixteen years old before she spawns for the first time, and she does not spawn every year. To lay her eggs she leaves the Caspian or Black Sea and swims far up a big river such as the Danube or the Volga. Those eggs are sold as caviar, and heavy fishing together with dams that block the rivers has left the species critically endangered. Fish farms and restocking projects now release young sturgeon to help the last wild ones.

Find it on the globe

Beluga sturgeon is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.