Four-year-old white sturgeons farmed by Sterling Caviar in Sacramento County. Photo: Jenny Oh

Sturgeons, the fish whose eggs are known as caviar, have been around for about 250 million years. These giants are the largest of the freshwater fish and have been known to grow to over 4,000 pounds and live more than 100 years. But it took us only a couple hundred years to deplete their stocks around the world, to the point where most caviar is now harvested from farmed sturgeon.

Caviar is generally associated with the Caspian Sea, the large land-locked body of water surrounded by Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Sturgeon are such big animals and the females produce so many eggs (in the wild, eggs can make up as much as 25 percent of their bodyweight) that historically they were a great source of protein. The caviar was for royalty, with the lightest-colored, blond caviar being reserved for the tsar, in Russia, and the shah, in Iran. But this year, virtually no wild-harvested caviar came out of that region.

Less known is the fact that in the late 1800s, the United States was a purveyor of wild-harvested caviar to the world.

“Here in California, they were harvesting millions of pounds in the late 1800s. And actually there was a town in New Jersey called Caviar, which was the world-leading exporter of caviar,” said Peter Struffeneger, general manager of Sterling Caviar, one of the two companies in California that farm sturgeon for caviar. “But within a span of 30 years they wiped it out. They closed down all fishing from about 1905 to the 1950s, 1960s, depending on which river, for the stocks to recover. And most of them have only gotten back to a point where there’s a limited sport fish for it.”

Two species of sturgeon are native to California: the white sturgeon and the green sturgeon. The green sturgeon is a threatened species and can’t even be fished by sport fishermen. Anglers in California can only catch three white sturgeon per year and need a special card from the state’s Department of Fish and Game to do so. White sturgeons have been plentiful in the Bay Area in 2011, according to this report. But sturgeon poaching remains a problem.

We filmed the caviar harvest at Sterling Caviar’s processing plant in Sacramento County. Sterling Caviar is one of only two companies in California, and a handful around the country, that are raising sturgeon for caviar and meat. (Sterling Caviar ships most of the meat overseas, though some ends up in Brooklyn, where it’s prized by the Russian community).

If you’ve ever wondered why caviar is so expensive (an ounce of Sterling’s highest-grade caviar goes for close to $90 on its Web site), one reason is that even in the best of circumstances, you can only harvest a small amount of it, said Struffeneger. It takes eight to 10 years for Sterling’s female sturgeons to produce eggs. The other reason for the high price, said Struffeneger, is caviar’s unique flavor.

“Maybe a hint of the ocean to it, but not an overbearing saltiness,” he said. “It should hit your taste buds and it actually explodes and you get this ‘wow’ sensation.”

Working with Serge Doroshov, a University of California, Davis, scientist who pioneered sturgeon farming in California, Sterling Caviar has figured out ways to farm sustainably. When the company started out, in the early 1980s, it got permits from the Department of Fish and Game to take white sturgeon from the Sacramento River. But in 1994 the company figured out how to spawn its own females, and since then it hasn’t taken any fish from the wild. And Sterling’s sturgeons are fed fish meal made from sustainably fished sardines and menhaden from Peru and Chile, he added.

For Struffeneger, who has degrees in marine and fisheries biology, the United States isn't doing enough to encourage aquaculture. As a result, he said, the country imports 82 percent of the fish we eat.

Fish farming is the only way forward, he said.

“You can’t increase the supply out of the oceans without doing what happened to sturgeon, destroying the resource,” he said. “One hundred years from now we’ll look back at this as a very transitional period in which we’ve really changed from a hunting-and-gathering society for our seafood to a farming-and-ranching society for our seafood.”

Pacific sardines at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: Adventures in Librarianship.

It’s back to school—for students, and for Pacific sardines. Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax, were once wildly abundant along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. From the 1920s to through the 1940s, they supported the largest fishery in the United States—millions were caught in and around Monterey Bay. (In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was once a sardine canning factory.) Though the Pacific sardine population crashed in the mid-1940s, it’s on the rise again.

While overfishing may have played a role in the population crash in the 1940s, oceanographic conditions were also very influential. The size of the Pacific sardine population fluctuates; their numbers increase when water is warm, and decrease when water is cold. This has been happening for quite some time; fish scales from sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin show that the sardines have been going through a boom-and-bust cycle for the past 1700 years.

In recent years, Pacific sardine numbers have been increasing steadily. Fishing started up again in California in the 1980s; by 2000, fisheries had been re-established off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, too. These days, Pacific sardines are doing fine. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide lists sardines as a “best choice.”

However, another schooling fish, Atlantic Herring isn’t doing quite as well. Many species of schooling fish are caught not for human consumption, but to feed poultry, livestock, and fish in the aquaculture industry. They’re processed into fishmeal and fish oil. This is a bit of a problem. Schooling fish (called clupeoid fish, for all of you aficionados) are an important part of the food web. They eat plankton, and in turn are eaten by larger predatory fish, marine mammals, and birds. Taking schooling fish out of the ocean, so they can be food for our other food, has serious repercussions for the marine food web.

Fish swim in schools to protect themselves from predators. But this strategy doesn’t really work when humans are the major predator, with our purse seines and spotting planes. Pacific sardines have recovered because of good fisheries management and favorable ocean conditions. Hopefully other fish will have a similar opportunity to go back to school.

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Volunteers have a whale of a time working to save our seas. Join the fun this weekend!

Friday may be National Doughnut Day, but the real party this weekend is on June 8th in celebration of World Ocean Day. WOD, the brainchild of our Canadian brethren, is a worldwide effort to raise awareness and promote personal connection with the oceans that sustain life on this planet. Because we are lucky to have the ocean as our neighbor here in the Bay Area, there are a number of incredible events surrounding the celebration:

Ocean Beach Cleanup
When: Sunday, June 7th, 10 AM -12 noon
Where: Ocean Beach at the Judah Street Entrance, San Francisco
OceanHealth.Org teams up with the San Francisco Chapter of Surfrider for our annual World Ocean Day beach cleanup in San Francisco at Ocean Beach. There will be gloves and bags. Just bring yourself and dress for variable weather. The event is co-sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences & the Aquarium of the Bay.

I have quite the personal connection to SF’s Ocean Beach. For the past 2.5 years, I have led the Ocean Beach Foundation, working to preserve the beach with the fire pit installations as well as organizing weekly cleanups. It’s quite amazing what you can find out on the beach during cleanups…I’ve found everything from a huge Barbie dollhouse to an old school Radio Flyer (the toy of my youth!). I hope you’ll take part in the Ocean Beach cleanup.

World Oceans Day Film Festival
When: Wednesday, June 10th, 7-10 PM
Where: Victoria Theater, San Francisco
OceanHealth.org is celebrating World Ocean’s Day by screening a few short ocean films. We hope that you'll join us in this great location to share our love of the oceans and to view a variety of films showing perspectives on the ocean.

Purchase advance tickets at http://www.victoriatheatre.org or purchase tickets at the box office on the day of the film. Cost $10.

Some of the great films you'll see:
A Sea Change, End of the Line, Silent Snow, Keeping Coast, Favela Surf Dreams, Papa Tortuga, Revolution of the Crabs

Sustainable Seafood at Cal Academy’s Nightlife
When: Thursday, June 11th, 6-10 PM
Where: California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
The Academy and its partners in the San Francisco Seafood Watch Alliance are pulling out all the stops to encourage visitors to make sustainable seafood choices.

Local celebrity chefs will whip up tasty treats during sustainable seafood cooking demonstrations: Eric Magnani from Global Gourmet Catering, Kin Lui and Casson Trenor from Tataki Sushi & Sake Bar, Craig Stoll from Delfina, and Loretta Keller from COCO5OO and The Moss Room. Also, we’ll host a screening of “The End of the Line,” a new film about overfishing that received rave reviews at Sundance.

Nightlife often sells out, it is suggested to buy your tickets ahead of time.

For even more events, check out OceanHealth.org

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This sushi is good enough to eat.
Photo credit: Andrea Kissack.

There is a new trend in town. Sustainable sushi. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, and two other ocean conservation groups (Blue Ocean Institute and Environmental Defense Fund), have come out with new advice for making better sushi choices. Modeled after the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s popular Seafood Watch Pocket Guide, the new sustainable sushi guide helps consumers make informed choices by categorizing seafood into three areas: Green (or best choice), Yellow (or good alternative) and Red (what to avoid). Just what kind of sushi you should avoid may surprise you. Until now, Unagi (bbq eel with avocado), seemed pretty harmless and a good choice for reluctant sushi eaters. Well, Unagi is farmed, freshwater juvenile eel so that definitely gets a red light from the Seafood Watch folks. You can try a sustainable alternative to Unagi at Tataki Sushi Bar in San Francisco. It may be the only restaurant of it’s kind in the country. The owners of the all sustainable sushi restaurant say they don’t want to become a niche as much as they want to influence the rest of the industry to change its’ practices. And with sushi a growing multibillion dollar industry, consumer preferences can have a big impact.

So how do you green your sushi? Try Pacific Halibut, farmed scallop or North American Albacore. Monterey Bay Aquarium biologists consider these among the “best” seafood because they come from abundant, well-managed fisheries or are raised using sustainable aquaculture methods.