MOSCOW, May 11. /TASS/. The sturgeon population in the Caspian Sea may recover in eight-ten years if the poaching level goes down, Director of the Russian Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography Kirill Kolonchin told TASS on Friday.
"The situation is challenging: poaching continues until now. There have been a lot of cases of legalizing confiscated products, when companies attempt to misrepresent wild caviar as aquaculture one. Total damages from sturgeon poaching in the Caspian region are estimated at almost 6 bln rubles ($97 mln). If we manage to reduce this figure by joint efforts, then we may expect population recovery in 8-10 years," the expert said.
The population of sturgeons in the Caspian Sea fell 2.5-fold over the last decade to 8 mln species, Kolonchin said. "The pressure of international poaching prevents us from increasing the population. The only thing we manage to do now is to at least stabilize it at the current level," he added.
The moratorium on sturgeon catching in the Caspian Sea must be kept until 2027, Deputy Head of the Federal Agency for Fisheries Vasily Sokolov said earlier. Russia plans to allocate 715.7 mln rubles ($11.6 mln) of budget and private investments for sturgeons’ reproduction in 2018. 36.1 mln species of young fish are planned to be stocked this year.