Kazakhs Crack Open Secrets of Caviar.

(From The Moscow Times)

ATYRAU, Kazakhstan -- With beluga caviar fetching $3,000 per kilogram in the West, lust for a cut of the cash has driven concerns of overfishing far from the minds of fisheries officials in the five states that border the Caspian Sea, home to the world's last major population of the sought-after sturgeon.

For more than a decade, Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan have resisted meddling from conservation groups seeking to reverse the decline among the beluga population.

But recently Kazakhstan broke ranks with the others and welcomed the largest of these groups -- a group whose leader had encountered only closed doors on a trip last year to Astrakhan, Russia's caviar capital.

Last week, under the approving gaze of Kazakh officials, two scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society tagged 231 baby beluga sturgeon in a first step toward solving one of the Caspian's thorniest questions: Which fish does each country have a right to call its own?

"We want to know where our fish go," said Adilgeri Kairalapov, director of a hatchery on Kazakhstan's Ural River that each year releases more than 1 million baby beluga into the sea.

When the tagged fingerlings, called such for their first year of life when they are about a finger's length long, return to spawn in the Ural 15 years from now and are caught, the ID tags will help scientists calculate how many of the original stock survived.