Compared to teleosts, little is known about the stress response in chondrosteans, and the glucocorticoid(s) most responsive to stress have never been definitively determined in sturgeon. In terms of cortisol production, pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) have a low physiological response to stress compared to other sturgeons (Acipenser s.p.). Because of this, our null hypothesis was that co...

Historically the Chesapeake Bay supported a large population of Atlantic sturgeon Acipenser oxyrinchus, but loss of suitable spawning habitat and overfishing coincided with dramatic in-system declines throughout the 20th century. Atlantic sturgeon harvest moratoriums were implemented in 1974 for Virginia waters and were expanded coastwide in 1998. In 1997, researchers became aware that commerci...

Populations of sturgeon (Acipenseridae) are declining in many places in the world because of several potential factors, including overharvesting, habitat alteration, and pollution. In North America, populations of the white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) have been experiencing poor annual recruitment in major river systems for more than three decades. Metal pollution has been hypothesized a...

Acipenseriformes are composed of 25 sturgeon species and two paddlefish species distributed exclusively in the northern hemisphere. The Danube River and the Black Sea were originally inhabited by six sturgeon species but two are extinct and only four are still reproducing currently in the Lower Danube: Huso huso, Acipenser stellatus, A. gueldenstaedtii and A. ruthenus. Sturgeon species hybridiz...

The green sturgeon, Acipenser medirostris, is one of two acipenserid fishes native to the temperate waters of the Pacific coast of North America. Originally, three species of sturgeon were described from this region, and this one named ‘‘medirostris’’ or ‘‘middle snout’’ based on the length of its rostrum relative to the other purported species (Ayers 1854), both of which were later determined ...

Here we present the first isolation of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I genes from two ancient fish, paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) and Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis). Seventeen sequences obtained showed high polymorphism and positive natural selection with dN/dS>1. Evolutionary relationships revealed that sequences from paddlefish and Chinese sturgeon distinguished from ot...

A multistressor study was conducted to investigate interactive effects of nutritional status and salinity on osmoregulation of juvenile white sturgeon. Our hypothesis was that lower nutritional status would decrease the salinity tolerance of juvenile white sturgeon. A four-week feed restriction (12.5%, 25%, 50%, 100% of optimum feeding rate: OFR defined as the rate (% body weight per day) at wh...

Osteocalcin (OC) and matrix Gla protein (MGP) are considered evolutionarily related because they share key structural features, although they have been described to exert different functions. In this work, we report the identification and characterization of both OC and MGP from the Adriatic sturgeon, a ray-finned fish characterized by a slow evolution and the retention of many ancestral featur...

Data from 1238 fishes from 19 sturgeon species and 1 paddlefish were used to analyze heteroplasmy in sturgeon. Lengths of central repeat units ranged from 74 to 83 bp among sturgeon species. No repeat sequence was found in the paddlefish, Polyodon spathula. A general feature of the repeat units was the presence of termination associated sequence (TAS) motifs. About 50% of 138 interspecific muta...

The solubility of protein components in salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) and sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) caviar in distilled water, 5% (w/v) NaCl, 70% (v/v) ethanol at 65C, and 0.2% (w/v) NaOH was determined. The salt soluble proteins were the predominant fraction and constituted 84.2% of the recovered protein in salmon and 86.1% in sturgeon samples. The two most prominent protein fractions (1...