IRRATIONAL preferences for caviar from rarer species are likely to drive the few remaining caviar sturgeon in the Caspian Sea to extinction.
Franck Courchamp and Agnès Gault of the University of Paris-South in Orsay ran taste tests at luxury receptions, where people were used to eating caviar, and among naive consumers at supermarkets. Tasters were presented with samples said to be from a “rare” and a “common” species – although both actually came from farmed sturgeon.
Even before tasting, 57 per cent of people at the luxury receptions expressed a preference for the “rare” caviar, while none preferred the “common” alternative, Courchamp told the Society for Conservation Biology’s meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Monday. After tasting the two identical samples, 70 per cent of the experienced consumers said they preferred the “rare” caviar.
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“After they had tasted the two identical samples, 70 per cent of people said they preferred the ‘rare’ caviar”
It was the same story in the supermarkets, with 52 per cent preferring the “rare” caviar before tasting it, and 74 per cent expressing the same preference after they had done so. “It’s very scary,” says Ellen Pikitch of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science in New York.
The fact that people who are not yet in the champagne-and-caviar set have the same predilection means that threats to sturgeon will only grow with rising prosperity. “The expanding economy of China is going to put hundreds of thousands of people in reach of these kinds of luxury products,” Courchamp notes.
The results suggest that the availability of farmed products may do little to protect sturgeon from extinction in the absence of a total ban on trading wild-caught caviar.
A one-year ban was introduced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 2006, but failed to halt the sturgeons’ decline. “You don’t save species by stopping trade for a year,” says Pikitch, who runs the charity Caviar Emptor, which is striving to save wild sturgeon. According to some estimates, sturgeon could be virtually wiped out in the Caspian Sea by 2012 at current rates of exploitation.
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