How long does a sturgeon take to produce caviar?

Longer than almost any farmed animal takes to reach market. The US Fish and Wildlife Service puts female beluga sturgeon at 14 to 20 years before they can reproduce and males at 10 to 16. Atlantic sturgeon from the Saint Lawrence River population mature at 22 to 34 years old.

Was caviar always expensive?

No. In the late 1800s Atlantic sturgeon were second only to lobster among important American fisheries, with landings estimated at seven million pounds a year, and the scramble for their roe was known as the Black Gold Rush. Populations had declined drastically by the beginning of the 1900s.

Are sturgeon protected by law?

Yes. All previously unlisted sturgeons and paddlefishes were added to CITES Appendix II in 1998, the beluga sturgeon was listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act in 2004, and Atlantic sturgeon were listed as five distinct population segments in 2012.

Why Is Caviar So Expensive? We Ate the Fish First

Q: Why is caviar so expensive?

Because the fish that makes it breeds slowly and there are far fewer of them than there once were. A female beluga sturgeon reaches reproductive capacity at 14 to 20 years old and then spawns only once every 4 to 8 years, and international trade in every sturgeon species has been controlled under CITES since 1998.

On 21 April 2004, the US Fish and Wildlife Service published a rule in the Federal Register about a fish that has never swum in American waters. It runs for pages in the flat register of federal rulemaking, and buried in the biology section are two numbers that explain the price of caviar better than any menu.

The fish is the beluga sturgeon, Huso huso, whose range is now limited to the Caspian and Black Sea basins. The numbers describe how long a female waits before she can breed, and how long she waits before doing it again.

Why is caviar so expensive?

Because the supply is throttled at the source. A female beluga sturgeon reaches reproductive capacity at 14 to 20 years of age and thereafter reproduces once every 4 to 8 years, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Wild stocks collapsed a century ago, and international trade has been licensed since 1998.

Maturity is only half the clock

Slow maturity is the fact every caviar seller quotes, and it is correct. The 2004 listing rule puts male beluga at 10 to 16 years and females at 14 to 20. On its own that would make caviar a late crop, and a late crop still arrives every year.

The sentence that does the damage comes next. Females reproduce once every 4 to 8 years, so a fish fed and guarded for two decades then yields intermittently rather than annually. A grower waits once for the animal to grow up, and keeps waiting between spawnings, on a fish that can live past 50. A Wagyu steer, fattened on grain for a year and a half, goes to slaughter at 28 to 30 months.

Fish	Age at first spawning	Gap between spawnings
Beluga sturgeon, female	14 to 20 years	4 to 8 years
Beluga sturgeon, male	10 to 16 years	4 to 7 years
Atlantic sturgeon, female	close to 20 years	3 to 5 years
Atlantic sturgeon, Saint Lawrence stock	22 to 34 years	not stated

Figures from the 2004 Fish and Wildlife Service rule, the Chesapeake Bay Program and NOAA Fisheries.

The rule states the transaction without decoration: “the female beluga sturgeon is harvested to produce beluga caviar”. Each tin costs a breeding female, taken from a population where breeding females are the scarce part.

One number runs in the fish’s favour. An adult female beluga can produce up to 12 percent of her body weight in roe, which is why a single large fish is worth chasing at all. Animal biology hands out lopsided figures like that constantly, and the reason bird droppings come out white is another of them.

Most food animals are priced by the season. A beluga is priced by the generation: 14 to 20 years before a female carries roe at all, then a gap of 4 to 8 years before she carries it again.

America ate its own sturgeon in a single generation

The popular story says caviar has always been rare and always been food for kings, so the price reflects a permanent fact of nature. The American record contradicts that.

NOAA Fisheries describes what happened on the east coast: “During the late 1800s, people flocked to the eastern United States in search of caviar riches from the sturgeon fishery, known as the ‘Black Gold Rush.’” The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission supplies the scale. In the late 1800s Atlantic sturgeon “were second only to lobster among important fisheries, with landings estimated at seven million pounds per year just prior to the turn of the century.”

Seven million pounds a year, from a fish it is now illegal to catch, keep or take eggs from. The 1800s ran on animals in ways that are easy to forget now, from the sturgeon crowding the rivers to the working horses that needed iron nailed to their feet.

By the beginning of the 1900s, NOAA says, populations “had declined drastically and continued to decline until the coastwide moratorium”, which the Commission and the federal government imposed in late 1997 and early 1998. In 2012 Atlantic sturgeon were listed under the Endangered Species Act as five distinct population segments, four of them endangered and the Gulf of Maine population threatened. Pearl beds took far longer to exhaust: thousands of years of pearl fishing “decimated the natural pearl beds,” the Gemological Institute of America says, and most pearls sold today are cultured.

Europe lost its stock a second way. Beluga harvest on the Danube averaged 23 metric tons a year in the mid-1970s, and the 2004 rule records that after the Djerdap I and II dams went up the harvest fell to 12.7 tons within a decade. A sturgeon blocked from its spawning river does not go and spawn somewhere else instead.

The scarcity has dates and causes on both sides of the Atlantic, and people supplied both. Other seafood reputations are younger still: before the Second World War a lot of bluefin tuna sold so cheaply that some went for cat food, and it caught on as a sushi topping only after fast freezing developed.

Then the paperwork arrived

The collapse rewrote the law, and the law rewrote the price.

In 1998, all previously unlisted sturgeons and paddlefishes were added to Appendix II of CITES, the treaty that controls international trade in threatened species. The April 2004 rule then added the beluga to the US threatened list, effective that October. Every legal tin since carries permits, inspection and paperwork before anyone tastes anything.

Illegal supply fills the gap and warps everything around it. The 2004 rule cites a 1996 estimate that illegal harvest of Caspian Sea sturgeons ran 6 to 10 times higher than legal harvest, and notes later assessments suggesting the illegal trade “may be some 11 times greater than the legal market”. Rules written around a valuable commodity leave permanent marks on it, much as the milled edge of a coin records an old fraud.

For an official price anchor, the same rule states: “In 1995, the retail price for one pound of beluga caviar in the United States was US$1,000.”

The scarcity has a date on it

That rule also records what the fish used to be. During the early 20th century, 100-year-old beluga sturgeon “were commonly taken”. The oldest fish harvested now run 50 to 55 years, with an average age under 35. The same document puts individual fish at up to 6 metres and more than a ton in weight.

The tin on the counter holds roe from a younger, smaller animal than the ones that built caviar’s reputation, and it costs what it costs because there are fewer of them, and there are fewer of them because three or four generations of buyers moved faster than the fish could breed. The price is a receipt. Strictly FYI.