ASTANA – Fishermen of the Amangeldy production cooperative in Atyrau recently caught a huge beluga fish weighing 160 kilogrammes. The fish was caught in seine in the lower part of the Ural River on April 1, ATPress.kz reports.
Photo credit: © Rakhim Koilybayev-ATPress.kz
“She is more than two metres long. The fish is now placed in a pool of one of our production facilities and we plan to get its spawn for reproduction in a little while,” said Gilman Sarsemaliyev, head of Ural-Atyrau sturgeon fish-breeding farm, according to the news website.
This is the first sample of this year’s spring fishing season that fishermen from fishing enterprises have reported.
Engineer-in-Chief of the fishing enterprise Bolat Mukhatzhiyev said they did not encounter big-sized beluga fishes last year. There was a 120-kilogramme male beluga but no females were there, according to him.
Mukhatzhiyev said the fish that was caught is in a good condition and has no visible wounds.
“We will keep hoping we will receive a good brood from her very soon. We will wait for favourable weather conditions for beluga fishes and begin pairing male and female species. I can say that we will be able to get more than 30 kilogrammes of roe from this fish,” he stated.
Fishermen of the Amangeldy cooperative caught a 300-kilogramme, 3-metre-long beluga fish about four years ago, in April 2013. The big fish tore through the net and nearly escaped, news reports say. Staff of the fish breeding farm were not able to save the life of beluga but cut the fish open to derive roe.
Over the years, fishermen from this cooperative have caught more that 70-80 percent of all species of sturgeon breeds that this farm has.
Beluga is among the biggest freshwater fishes on earth. They live for 100 years. Some specific species reach up to 1 tonne or 1,000 kilogrammes in weight and 4.2 metres in length. It is considered great luck to catch a big beluga fish.
