Mikola Kopanetskyi waded waist high in an outdoor water tank the size of an above-ground pool, slowly creeping up on the beluga sturgeon swimming in front of him. Once he sneaked close enough, Kopanetskyi clamped a hand over the fish’s long snout, and the battle was on.

The finned behemoth began to thrash, but Kopanetskyi held firm, shushing it softly in Russian. Once the sturgeon started to tire, the burly fish farmer looped an arm under its stomach, grinning as he hoisted the 100-pound fish into the air.

David Bashkov watched Kopanetskyi’s victory from outside the tank, reaching out to give the sturgeon’s leathery side an affectionate stroke. Beluga are already scarce, Bashkov said, but the one trying to escape Kopanetskyi’s grip was even more special: A pure white albino, making it one in about 2,000.

“This is the rarest fish in the world,” Bashkov said.

The statement isn’t quite accurate — the most elusive is arguably the Devil’s Hole pupfish of Nevada, on the other side of the world from the beluga’s native habitat in Eastern Europe. Still, beluga are rare in that they’re only found in a few corners of the planet, in the Black and Caspian Seas.

Rare, and worth their weight in roe.

Bashkov is a caviar specialist at Sturgeon AquaFarms in Jackson County, Florida, northwest of Tallahassee — the only U.S. fish farm authorized to sell the species’ high-value eggs. It’s illegal to import beluga sturgeon or its caviar due to the fish’s critically endangered status. Sturgeon AquaFarms can do it with harvested eggs. The prehistoric creature’s population has steadily declined for decades; researchers estimate the species could be extinct in the wild by 2050.

Between threats like habitat loss and black market poaching, it’s possible more beluga now swim in Florida’s rural farm towns than in their native habitat.

Caviar ‘farm to spoon’

Beluga sturgeon, also called huso huso, evolved nearly 200 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic period. With a ridged spine, hulking frame and shark-like tail, they resemble modern-day dinosaurs. They’re also the world’s largest freshwater fish, reaching up to 23 feet long and more than three tons.

While sturgeon can live longer than a century, the oldest at Sturgeon AquaFarms are about 25 years old. These 400-pounders serve as the farm’s broodstock, or the ancestors of all the other fish on the farm.

The majority of the farm’s roughly 30,000 fish were hatched in Florida. But Marky’s, the parent company of Sturgeon AquaFarms, brought the broodstock from nations like Russia and Bulgaria — before the U.S. banned beluga imports in 2005. Back then, selling “farm-to-spoon” caviar was nothing more than a Ukrainian immigrant’s vision.

Mark Zaslavsky, the co-founder of Sturgeon AquaFarms and Bashkov’s grandfather, said he began flying sturgeon to the U.S. on transatlantic flights in 2003 after witnessing the species’ global decline, when international restrictions on selling the fish were beginning to tighten.

“It became apparent that we wouldn’t have any caviar in five or 10 years,” Zaslavsky said.

Zaslavsky runs Marky’s alongside his business partner Mark Gelman. After the import ban hit, the pair spent over a decade growing their company and applying for permits to sell farm-raised roe. In 2019, Marky’s became the only company in the U.S. to receive a federal exemption to sell purebred beluga caviar, mostly because its owners had brought over the fish pre-ban.

Under the Endangered Species Act, Marky’s had to fulfill three requirements to sell beluga: it can’t source its sturgeon from the wild or harm local ecosystems and must partner with the fish’s native countries for conservation.

The farm raises other species of sturgeon like sevruga, osetra, Siberian and sterlet. But none are as labor-intensive — or as valuable — as beluga.

Harvesting beluga caviar requires a decade of waiting. Sturgeon AquaFarms nurses its belugas for the 10 years it takes the fish to mature, carefully feeding and monitoring their growth. Once the fish are old enough to produce caviar, the farm performs an ultrasound on each individual sturgeon to determine whether it’s ready. Sometimes, Bashkov said, the farm will take a biopsy of the fish’s eggs and check them under a microscope, evaluating their ovulation stage to determine whether the caviar is harvestable.

If a fish is deemed ready, it’s moved to a separate tank in a dark room with water colder than the normal 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The chilled temperatures and lack of light put the sturgeon in hibernation mode, ensuring it doesn’t move out of the right ovulation cycle. The new tank’s water temperature is dropped one degree every two days until it reaches a frigid 44 degrees. Fish are fragile, Bashkov said, and the incremental cooling makes sure the beluga don’t go into shock. Farmers also withhold food, so any waste is flushed from the sturgeon ahead of time.

When it’s time to harvest, the sturgeon are killed with one quick blow to the head. Their soft underbellies are sliced open, where roe can then be cut out by the handful. One beluga alone recently produced about 25 pounds of caviar — worth about $200,000.

Once the eggs are harvested, they’re gently rubbed over a metal screen to remove them from the fish’s ovaries, then rinsed, dried and salted before being packed away in blue tins. Weights are placed on top of the tins for a day to drain any excess water, then the tins are flipped over and weighed down for a second day.

It’s possible to extract roe without killing the fish, Bashkov said, by temporarily putting it to sleep and milking it of caviar. Yet this method yields less caviar, and often stresses the sturgeon to death.

Producing caviar is labor-intensive and expensive, which is why Sturgeon AquaFarms tries to harvest only what it can sell. Still, the farm has more fish than it can use.

“It’s becoming more of a zoo,” Bashkov said over the sound of humming tanks and trickling water, gesturing to the dozens of tanks around him.

Farm co-founder Zaslavsky originally didn’t want Marky’s to be a family affair — he thought mixing business and relatives would be too messy. Yet his grandchildren didn’t give the 72-year-old much of a choice.

Danielle Zaslavsky, Bashkov’s sister, manages the business side of things, promoting Marky’s products and collaborating with other brands. She’s also a social media influencer, racking up nearly one million followers on TikTok for her viral videos showcasing caviar as a casual snack — using it as a garnish on eggs, Doritos and ice cream cones. In her most popular videos, Obolevitch opens golden tins from Marky’s, letting the shiny roe catch the light as she offers up tips for viewers who have never tasted caviar.

Bashkov is nicknamed the “caviar king.” The 27-year-old fell in love with working on the farm as a teenager. He likens caviar harvesting to an artform, his obsession obvious through the books he keeps crammed full of notes on his processing experiments.

Once caviar is harvested, He toys with the amount of salt used or the time the roe is left to cure, taking account of miniscule differences in texture or taste.

Even among caviar connoisseurs, beluga is special. The eggs have a distinctive pop and deep flavor that other varieties lack, Bashkov said, making it the “Rolls-Royce” of caviar. It’s certainly the most expensive variety Marky’s offers — the base price for one ounce is $520.

As the only business in the nation allowed to sell beluga, Sturgeon AquaFarms has a leg up on other American caviar producers.

“If somebody wants it, there’s only one place they can get it,” Bashkov said.

The beluga black market

They can get it in only one place, legally speaking.

While authentic, federally approved beluga can be bought in the U.S. only from Marky’s, caviar is a global gold mine for illegal activity. In 2022, California law officers arrested eight people for running a caviar black market ring. In countries near the beluga’s native habitat like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine, between 50 and 65 trafficking cases are reported every year.

Thomas Friedrich, a scientist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Austria, estimates the true number of trafficked sturgeon is at least three to five times higher than what’s seized by authorities.

Friedrich, who works with sturgeon conservation in the species’ native region, said the fish is in dire straits. Based on current trajectories, at least one-third of the roughly two dozen existing species of sturgeon (including beluga) will be extinct within the next two decades.

“With another third being probably not that far behind,” Friedrich added.

Estimating how many beluga remain in their native regions of the Black and Caspian seas is a bit like looking into a crystal ball, he said, but it’s likely not more than a couple thousand.

Human-built dams have caused devastating habitat loss, severing beluga from migratory routes and spawning grounds they once occupied for centuries. Yet by far, the most pervasive threat is overfishing, often spurred by the black market.

Friedrich recalled traveling through a small village in Romania, where fishers scour the nearby Danube River for sturgeon. While Friedrich drove his car through the village, two separate fishermen stood on the street, spreading their arms wide. The signal was to communicate they had poached sturgeon for sale, Friedrich said.

Fishing sturgeon is illegal and punishable by hefty fines and imprisonment. But the lucrative allure of the fish often outweighs any potential penalty. Jutta Jahrl, a researcher at the World Wildlife Fund, said poachers will catch any sturgeon they can get their hands on, cutting them open without knowing the fish’s gender in the hopes of finding valuable roe.

“If they find one with caviar inside, it’s kind of like a lottery,” she said.

In general, sturgeon aquaculture is a positive solution to poaching, Jahrl and Friedrich said. Sourcing caviar from farmed fish reduces the demand for wild-caught caviar, easing the pressure on the species’ stocks.

Yet it’s not always just poachers contributing to the black market.

Jahrl collects data from local authorities on sturgeon poaching to track the scale of global black markets, and said illegal fishing is so pervasive that it shows up in places customers might not expect. In a survey led by Jahrl, WWF researchers collected samples of sturgeon meat and caviar from restaurants, markets and other legal channels. A third of the sampled caviar was sold illegally. Some came from wild-caught sturgeon. Some samples were mislabeled, or sold without proper permitting. Some of the caviar didn’t come from a fish at all — a few samples were entirely artificial.

Illegal caviar isn’t just an environmental issue, Jahrl said, but poses serious human health risks. Poachers will transport a dead sturgeon for miles uncooled, hiding caviar in unsanitary conditions. Jahrl recalled testing a caviar sample that turned green when dissolved, indicating unknown and potentially hazardous chemicals were used to color it.

“The risk of getting something from this caviar is quite high,” she said.

But tracing the black market isn’t easy. It gets tricky to find the source of illegal activity, Jahrl said — it could be the caviar company, the wholesale retailer or the sturgeon farm producing it.

Fishy past

Two decades ago, federal investigators alleged Marky’s was one of those companies caught in black market dealings.

In 2004, Optimus Inc. — the company doing business as Marky’s — pleaded guilty to federal wildlife and smuggling charges. The company admitted to buying nearly six tons of smuggled caviar from five different black market rings, using fake invoices to make the purchases seem legitimate. Marky’s wired money to foreign bank accounts, receiving the caviar by courier or mail.

One of the company’s sources for roe was Russian national Viktor Tsimbal, who ran a Miami-based caviar company — and an illegal smuggling operation. In the late ‘90s, Tsimbal paid a ring of couriers to bring suitcases full of mislabeled caviar from Europe to Miami. In 1999, he used false documents to smuggle more beluga caviar from Russia than the country’s total annual roe exports that year. In 2002, Tsimbal pleaded guilty to conspiracy, smuggling and money laundering and was sentenced to 41 months in prison.

Marky’s got off with lighter consequences. The company was fined $1 million, given five years of probation and required to develop a wildlife compliance plan.

Zaslavsky in an interview for this story denied that Marky’s was involved in the black market and said his company chose to plead guilty to avoid a long and expensive court battle.

“Not even one kilo of caviar came to the United States without a regional CITES permit,” Zaslavsky said, adding that he believes authorities prosecuted Marky’s because it was among the largest importers.

Since then, Zaslavsky said his company has accomplished what it set out to do decades ago: establish a source of American-farmed caviar that doesn’t rely on international imports. He also cited his company’s efforts to repopulate beluga in its native habitat.

In 2016 and 2017, Sturgeon AquaFarms sent over 160,000 fertilized beluga eggs to Azerbaijan to restock the fish in the nearby Caspian Sea. Zaslavsky said he’d be open to sending more eggs overseas, if another entity is willing to pay the cost — last time it cost him upwards of $30,000, he said.

“If a government wants to repopulate [the] Caspian Sea, I will do it,” he said. “Just…please pay expense.”

The process of sending beluga babies also requires precise organization and planning: Fertilized eggs must be sealed in a bag full of well-oxygenated water, and placed over ice to make sure they stay at the perfect temperature. As soon as they’re shipped overseas, the clock starts ticking — there’s a maximum window of three days to incubate the eggs before they’ll no longer hatch.

While sending the spawn of U.S. sturgeon to European countries can help, Austrian scientist Friedrich said, he doesn’t think it’s a sustainable solution. Other farms closer to the sturgeon’s native habitat that don’t have to send eggs halfway across the world are better suited for the task. They can work more effectively in the fish’s native environment, he said.

Shipping eggs from U.S. farms also requires genetic testing to see which geographic niche the sturgeon originated from, and carefully reintegrating them back into the same region.

“Does it really pay off?” Friedrich said. “Or would this money better be invested locally or in the region to establish conservation activities?”

Even under the most optimistic guess, it’s uncertain whether conservation efforts will be enough to save sturgeon from extinction in its native waters. But in the U.S., Sturgeon AquaFarms isn’t the only farm trying to expand the beluga’s reach.

‘They’re Florida fish now’

Pierson, a tiny town in Volusia County on Florida’s northeast Atlantic coast, is home to more sturgeon than people.

Giant tanks of lazy swimmers sit sandwiched between fields of cows and ponds of striped bass, carefully tended by three generations of the Evans family. Today, they’re not harvesting caviar.

Jane Evans Davis scoops tilapia from a tank with a net, loading them on a scale. She yells out the weights to her mother, 82-year-old Marilyn Evans, who adds the pounds by hand in a notepad from her seat in a golf cart.

“You shot up, Jane,” Evans calls as Davis hauls a net of heavyweight fish on the scale.

The Evans family harvests tilapia and striped bass multiple times a week, sourcing to Florida restaurants and markets looking for live, fresh fish. Marilyn Evans and her husband, Gene, started with cattle in 1982, though Gene dreamed of raising sturgeon.

They launched with tilapia and bass, which still make up the majority of the farm’s profit. Then the family added osetra, Siberian and sevruga sturgeon, spawning their own fish and harvesting caviar through their company Anastasia Gold Caviar.

They’ve been farming roe for over a decade now. When it’s time to harvest, 63-year-old Davis said, it’s an all-family affair — every child, grandchild, niece, nephew and nearby farmer is called in.

Similar to Sturgeon AquaFarms, fish selected for harvest at the Evans farm are kept in cold water for two to three months, then biopsied to confirm the eggs are ready. The Evans numb the chosen sturgeon in an ice bath before killing the fish and cleaning it — usually the meat is eaten or sold. The harvester makes an incision at the fish’s throat, bleeding it out entirely before it’s cut open and roe is pulled out.

After harvest comes the meticulous process of rinsing, drying, salting and weighing the caviar. Davis is precise in monitoring temperature and amounts of salt to ensure the caviar is safe to be sold and eaten. The farm only harvests one fish at a time, so Davis can label each gold tin of caviar with the specific sturgeon it came from.

The Evans also have beluga sturgeon — but not the federal exemption to sell their caviar. A decade ago, the farm sourced beluga from Sturgeon AquaFarms’ broodstock; in exchange, the Evans agreed to raise juvenile sturgeon and return some of them to Sturgeon AquaFarms to be harvested for caviar.

Evans Fish Farm is prohibited from harvesting its belugas’ eggs because of the Endangered Species Act restrictions. The farm meets the first two conditions of the exemption granted to Marky’s by not sourcing sturgeon from the wild or harming local ecosystems, but it hasn’t fulfilled the third requirement of working with the beluga’s native countries for conservation.

While the farm initially looked into international partnerships, Davis said political conflicts in eastern Europe like the Russia-Ukraine war have diverted attention away from wildlife conservation and toward human survival.

“You cried when you were reading what was happening in their country, because everything was about people,” Davis said, recalling a letter from Ukraine’s fisheries director. “It wasn’t about animals.”

Paired with a lack of local poaching enforcement, the Evans family decided to stop pursuing working with other nations because it felt like “throwing your money at the wind.”

Instead of trying to send eggs overseas to fulfill the current exemption, the Evans are lobbying to change the law, arguing sturgeon legally raised on American farms should be regulated as agriculture, not wildlife. The Evans are working with U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-FL, who sponsored a bill in 2023 that would amend the Endangered Species Act and allow farms to sell sturgeon held legally in captivity.

The bill failed, but the farm is working to rewrite the language and try again. While the Evans’ beluga might trace its lineage back to Europe, they said, the fish were hatched and raised in the Sunshine State.

“They’re Florida fish now,” Marilyn Evans said.

The Evans’ efforts are part of an emerging process called “closing the life cycle,” said Paul Wills, an aquaculture expert at Florida Atlantic University. Wills, who studied sturgeon at the Evans’ farm, said aquaculture is still in its infancy, and has historically relied on wild broodstock to replenish genetic diversity on fish farms.

But at the two Florida farms, selective breeding allows them to create their own broodstock, eliminating the need for wild-caught fish. By pairing up desirable fish, the farms can hatch new genetically diverse generations with desirable traits like size or disease resistance. This ensures the farms can keep producing caviar from their own fish, without having to import new sturgeon.

“In order for the industry to be sustainable and efficient, we need to have better control of those wild broodstocks,” Wills said.

If they can get federal permission, the Evans will add beluga to the farm’s repertoire. But they don’t envision caviar ever becoming their biggest seller. While farming is all around a difficult industry, roe comes with its own woes.

The Evans farm shares all the same problems with traditional farms: finicky weather, labor shortages, rising costs, expensive supplies. Yet aquaculture still isn’t viewed by many as a live animal business, Davis said, which means they don’t get the benefits other farms do — like electricity and fuel priority after a major hurricane.

The farm also faces steep overseas competition. Davis recalled chefs telling her about importing roe from countries like China, the world’s top caviar producer. The caviar is cheap, Davis said, harvested from hybrid sturgeon species. But you get what you pay for, she said.

“I go, ‘If your customers don’t care, then yeah, what am I supposed to do?’” she said.

Still, many of the farm’s regulars find value in the farm’s personal touch. Come harvest time, Davis will tell her regular chefs what kind of eggs she has ready: oilier caviar that’s good for cooking, or roe that rolls well on the tongue and can be sold for high-value tasting. While some companies use complex systems to price caviar, the farm uses the “Evans grading scale,” basing the cost of eggs on taste, size, hardness and how much they pop.

Being a family-owned operation also has its draw, Davis said. Customers can tour the farm, peering into sturgeon tanks while the Evans’ four brown and yellow labs romp in a nearby pond. The farm gives visitors an inside look at caviar making — and if they’re lucky, a taste of Marilyn Evans’ famous smoked sturgeon dip.

At Sturgeon AquaFarms, David Bashkov dreams of building a similar experience. He walks past humming tanks, where he envisions visitors swimming with sturgeon or feeding them. Bashkov waves to one of the nearby ponds, hoping its swaying reeds will one day be joined by canoes and splashing tourists.

Marky’s, the Sturgeon AquaFarms parent company, is already on the map for its caviar, but Bashkov hopes the farm will one day become an agro-tourism destination.

“We want to build this community for them to come and see something they’ve never seen before,” he said.

If the ancient animals continue to vanish from their native seas, Florida farms may someday be one of the few places they survive.

This story was originally published by WUFT News and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.

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