A fishing boat on the Amur River in the Chinese city of Heihe – credit, Oleg Fok CC 3.0. BY-SA
When the BBC visited China’s frigid northeastern province of Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River) in 2008 hoping to catch a glimpse of the river’s famous giant sturgeon, the English documentarians learned that there were no more giant sturgeon—that the Black Dragon River had been chronically overfished.
Yet as China’s economic advancements led to greater and greater concern over the environment, special effort was dedicated to saving the Heilongjiang sturgeon.
China shares the Heilongjiang with the Russians, who call it the Amur River, and environmental authorities from the two nations recently gathered in Tongjiang city to release some 5 million juvenile fish into the river.
Global Times reports that 200 juvenile Amur sturgeon, and 485,000 juvenile kaluga (another sturgeon species that inhabits the river) were dumped into the Amur in a mass-release ceremony on the first Tuesday in July.
“Another 5.2 million fry of commercially valuable fish species, including silver carp and grass carp,” were also released, the Times reported.
The outlet claimed that many of the sturgeons received injections of a fluorescent marker that would allow them to be tracked and identified throughout their lifespan, offering critical information about distribution and reproduction patterns. Though this year’s release is significant, similar efforts to try and recover sturgeon populations haven’t always translated into success.
Both Russia and China have maintained captive breeding and artificial propagation programs for years, resulting in 8.45 million Amur sturgeon fry alone being released into the Amur river by 2005. This didn’t translate into increased populations or number of mature individuals. China had initially wanted to protect the industry for sturgeon caviar through the captive breeding, but realized it wasn’t going to save the fish, and so legal commercial harvesting ended in 2007.
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Most data in English shows the population to have been assessed as “Critically Endangered” by the IUCN by 2006, and again in 2019, albeit with little additional data.
However Chen Huaifa, director of the Heilongjiang Aquatic Animal Resources Conservation Center, told the Global Times that in very recent times, monitored kaluga and Amur sturgeon are living to 5 years and older, something that was not recorded as little as 8 years ago. In 2025, the center recorded a sturgeon having lived 8 years, the age at which male sturgeons will contribute to spawning for the first time.
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“I have been fishing for decades. Now we have fish release activities every year, and seeing bags of fry being released into the river makes me truly happy,” fisherman Li Changyou told the Global Times.
“Stock enhancement is not only about protecting resources, but also about preserving a way of livelihood for fishermen like us and future generations. When there are more fish in the river, fishermen can have a more secure future,” he said.
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