VIU sturgeon lab making extra money by selling specimens to restaurants

Vancouver Island University started raising rare white sturgeon for research but now they're selling the specimens for food and they say local restaurants are hooked.

VIU said in a news release that the International Centre for Sturgeon Studies (ICSS) started selling cans of smoked fish and fresh fillets to restaurants to build awareness of their work and generate funds.

"The main focus of raising them is teaching and research. We use them as a species, basically, to teach students to raise them from eggs to adults," VIU dean of science and technology Don Noakes told All Point West host Robyn Burns.

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"We only have a certain capacity. As the fish get older, we can either ethically kill them and dispose of them, in, say a landfill, or we can use the meat."

The centre has a 10-foot sturgeon that could be between 25 and 50 years old, Noakes says, but the ones sold for food are about two years old.

Noakes says about 40-50 per cent of the animal is edible, and is mostly smoked and canned by a local fish processing company.

'Quite a nice tasting fish'

White sturgeon are native to the west coast of North America, but they are so rare that if caught, they must be released.

As a species they are more than 200 million years old, but when it comes to aquaculture, Noakes says they are a relatively new species for humans to raise. One company doing that is Sechelt's Northern Divine, which produces caviar as well.

"We don't know an awful lot about what the juveniles eat.We don't know the optimal temperature, density, handling those sorts of things," Noakes said.

Noakes says the lab-grown sturgeonhave receiveda positive reaction so far.

"It's actually quite a nice tasting fish," he said. "It's a white flesh, very mild; the meat itself is quite dense, denser than halibut. And it's quite tasty."

With files from CBC Radio One's All Points West