Diversion (i.e. extraction) of water from rivers and estuaries can potentially affect native wildlife populations if operation is not carefully managed. For example, open, unmodified water diversions can act as a source of injury or mortality to resident or migratory fishes from entrainment and impingement, and can cause habitat degradation and fragmentation. Fish-protection devices, such as ex...

The lake sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, belongs to one of the few extant nonteleost ray-finned fishes and diverged from the main vertebrate lineage about 250 million years ago. The aim of this study was to use this species to explore the peripheral neural coding strategies for sound direction and compare these results to modern bony fishes (teleosts). Extracellular recordings were made from af...

The natriuretic peptide (NP) family is composed of three members: atrial, brain/ventricular and C-type NPs (ANP, BNP/VNP and CNP respectively) in tetrapods and teleostean fish, but only CNP in elasmobranch fish. In order to trace the process of divergence of the NP family in early vertebrate evolution, we attempted to detect NPs in the primitive ray-finned fish, the sturgeon (Acipenser transmon...

In the reproduction process of male and female fish, pituitary derived gonadotropins (GTHs) play a key role. To be able to specifically investigate certain functions of Luteinizing (LH) and Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) in Russian sturgeon (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii; st), we produced recombinant variants of the hormones using the yeast Pichia pastoris as a protein production system. We acc...

administering growth hormone increases growth rate of cultured fish. the aim of this study was isolation and synthesize of persian sturgeon gh cdna. the total rna was extracted from pituitary gland of persian sturgeon and cdna was synthesized. the full-length cdna sequence of persian sturgeon contains a 645 nucleotide open reading frame, which encoding a 214 amino acid residues. the position of...

Understanding the scale at which wild stocks of Persian sturgeon (Acipenser persicus) are genetically discrete is necessary for effective management of this commercially important species. Disomic DNA microsatellite markers are among the best tools for determining stock structure in fishes. As all sturgeon species have a polyploid ancestry of all sturgeons, most gene loci exhibit more than two ...

Serum complement is valuable tool in determining the health status of fish. This study was conducted to examine in vitro activity of serum complement as an indicator of innate immunity in four sturgeon species, Acipenser stellatus, A. baeri, A. nudiventris and Huso huso (Chondrostei: Acipenseridae). The Effects of different temperatures, concentrations and volumes of serum on alternative comple...

Understanding potential limiting factors affecting population growth of the endangered pallid sturgeon, Scaphirhynchus albus, is important in upper (UMOR) and lower Missouri River (LMOR) basins. The UMOR upstream several reservoirs generally has more natural habitat features, whereas LMOR downstream these been channelized to support navigation. In both sections, sturgeon recruitment age-1 a con...

Sturgeon (family Acipenseridae) are regarded as living fossils due to their ancient origin and exceptionally slow evolution. To extend our knowledge of fish cardiac excitability to a Chondrostei fish, we examined electrophysiological phenotype of the Siberian sturgeon (Acipenser baerii) heart with recordings of epicardial ECG, intracellular action potentials (APs), and sarcolemmal ion currents....