00:01Caviar. To some it's a taste of luxury. To others it's an example of animal cruelty.
00:08Harvesting caviar normally requires killing the fish.
00:12You really need to eat caviar.
00:14But might there be a bloodless way to produce this delicacy?
00:18Caviar is the roe of the sturgeon which is critically endangered all over the world.
00:23But now another method of caviar production promises to be more ethical and sustainable.
00:28Odd cuisine and animal welfare don't need to be mutually exclusive.
00:35Black caviar is the unfertilized roe of sturgeon.
00:39And red caviar is the roe of salmon or trout.
00:42The fish generally have to be killed to get at the roe.
00:46The bigger and shinier the eggs, the more expensive the product.
00:50In southern Sweden Arctic roe of Scandinavia, or AROS for short, produces the exclusive delicacy.
01:00Nearly 2,000 Siberian sturgeon live in these tanks.
01:04And the workers take a different approach to removing the roe.
01:07We're not slaughtering our fish. That's the main difference between it.
01:10We're keeping them alive. They are giving caviar multiple times our fish.
01:14We've got fishes that are up to 4 times now that are giving caviar.
01:19So that saves fish lives and sustainable caviar.
01:24Each fish has a name. Harriet Tengner weighs in at 8.4 kilos.
01:30She's due for milking today, as it's called at AROS.
01:36This is done by massaging the roe out of the fish.
01:39Tweezers help to open the female sturgeon's egg ducts.
01:43The roe can make up as much as one-third of the fish's body weight.
01:48It's possible to do this procedure about once every two years.
01:52Do the fish experience pain?
01:54The people at AROS have no doubt that their fish are living well.
01:58But the milking is a rather arduous process and the fish need some time to recover from it.
02:03So this is our spa area where we do keep our fishes after production.
02:08They get to stay in a bit warmer water with added salt to stop any kind of infection.
02:13It's like any childbirth.
02:16The roe from these farmed sturgeon is made ready for consumption in the kitchen.
02:21First it's washed and rinsed in water twice, then dried.
02:25At that stage it looks like this.
02:28It still has to be salted.
02:30Three varieties are produced here.
02:32The small size starts at 640 Swedish crowns for about 57 euros.
02:38So can you really eat caviar and not have a guilty conscience?
02:45The caviar farms are a far cry from the sturgeon's original natural habitat.
02:50Europe's rivers once teemed with this migratory fish.
02:54Today all 25 surviving species of sturgeon are classified as threatened.
03:00They had disappeared from Sweden completely.
03:03Linnea Jagrud has plans to re-establish them.
03:07She and her team are collaborating with German researchers to breed a new population and release them into the Jötter-Alf river.
03:15She's fascinated by sturgeons.
03:17It can become 130 years old. That's cool.
03:20It can become 4.5 meters and become very heavy as well.
03:25Almost 500 kilograms. That's a lot.
03:28I find it very funny that they actually have a little bit of a personality.
03:32When we are handling them now, some of them are really, yeah, they're really divas.
03:37They're like, oh, I'm having, I'm fainting.
03:40And some of them are really tough ones.
03:42So that's cool. They have a little bit of difference.
03:44These fish are still young.
03:47The research centre has cared for them since they hatched in July 2024.
03:52Now they're ready for the wild.
03:55First, they spend some time in this cage to get used to their new environment.
03:59Then they'll be set free.
04:01The aim of the reintroduction programme is to get a vital population of sturgeons back into the river
04:09because they were once here and humans extirpated them.
04:14So they are now extinct and we are trying to get it back.
04:18And that is good because it's a piece of a puzzle in the ecosystem that we can actively bring back
04:26which will increase the biodiversity in the river and it will also have a number of positive aspects on other species.
04:35Linnea takes a critical view of farming sturgeon for the production of an exclusive delicacy, even by the sustainable methods.
04:43I guess it's a step towards the right direction, yeah.
04:46But it's still a fish egg that is not used as a fish.
04:50So it's still, I mean, one can is still a number of fish eggs that's not a fish.
04:57It would be actually better to have a fish that eat the fish, but actually do we need it?
05:02Do we really need to eat caviar?
05:04In the rivers or on the table, caviar remains controversial.
05:13Archer does not fit for the wild.
05:16So with the dotted terms, it will not fit for the river.
05:18We will need to log in.
05:19If we're going to get a fish, we should have to eat담.
05:21It's his head.
05:22We need to make a fish, so we must be able to do the river.
05:23So for them who we are and then we can still go out.
05:24We have to do the river to walk in the river.
05:25So my little river can go out.
05:27We can't go out.
05:28So we can't go out.
05:29If we can go out.
05:30We can go out in the river.
05:31We can go out.
05:32We can find a fish that are watching the river and the river's.
05:33So let's go out.
05:34We can go out.
Comments