Richard Collins: There are 27 surviving species of sturgeon

The tradition of giving the first sturgeon of the year — the  ‘royal fish’ — as a gift was not confined to Ireland and Britain

On April 2, 1966, the Árd Íde was fishing in Finian’s Bay between Portmagee and Ballinskelligs when a sturgeon was caught in its nets. The fish was kept alive on deck under wet sacks until the boat returned to Dingle.

According to tradition, the first sturgeon of the year is presented to the Queen. Our ‘monarch’, by then, was the president Éamon de Valera, so the Áras was contacted. Dev, however, asked that the fish be given to the Poor Clare nuns in Kenmare.

Meanwhile back on Dingle pier, people had gathered to see the ocean celebrity. Someone shouted to a 19-year old crewman to ‘throw it out’ onto the quay, so that they could get a better look at it. He thought they wanted him to release the fish, so he threw it overboard. The sturgeon, worth at least IR£3,000 on the fish market, swam off to safety.

A paper just published shows that the tradition of giving the ‘royal fish’ as a gift was not confined to Ireland and Britain. Excavations in the Baltic Sea have revealed that King Hans of Denmark intended offering a sturgeon to the Swedish regent Sten Sture, five centuries ago.

In the summer of 1495, the royal flagship Gribshunden, with King Hans on board, set sail from Copenhagen bound for Kalmar. Hans wanted to persuade the Brexit-leaning Swede to accept him as king and keep intact the Kalmar Union, an early Nordic-only version of the EU. Then fate intervened.

While at anchor in the Baltic, the Gribshunden caught fire and sank. The king had taken shelter ashore overnight and was not on board, but the crew and the ship’s valuable cargo were lost.

Although it still breeds on the east coast of North America, and was once abundant on this side of the ocean, the Atlantic sturgeon is now virtually extinct in Irish and Baltic waters.

During seabed excavations of the wreck in August last year, archaeologists from the University of Lund discovered an array of luxury goods, with which the King hoped to impress Sture. Among them were wooden barrels. One, sealed watertight, contained butchered fish, sufficiently well preserved to be identified by DNA analysis as sturgeon. "The near-complete remains are unique archaeologically," the researchers say. Chop marks seem to show that a single Atlantic sturgeon was cut into pieces and placed in the barrel.

There are 27 surviving species of sturgeon; ‘living fossils’, they evolved over 200 million years ago, long before the emergence of the familiar mammals we have today. Big long-lived fish, they are able to move, like salmon, between fresh and sea water. Caviar, the salt-cured roe of wild sturgeon, comes from Black and Caspian Sea species.

Although it still breeds on the east coast of North America, and was once abundant on this side of the ocean, the Atlantic sturgeon is now virtually extinct in Irish and Baltic waters. The one on display in Dublin’s Natural History Museum was caught locally in 1890.

By an extraordinary coincidence, a second sturgeon was caught off Kerry on the day of the Dingle one’s lucky escape. The Kerryman reported that the skipper, on this occasion, would not offer the fish to Dev. The sturgeon was sold to Billingsgate Fish Market and ended up in Buckingham Palace.

Stella Macheridis et al. Fish in a barrel: Atlantic sturgeon from the Baltic Sea wreck of the royal Danish flagship Gribshunden (1495). Journal of Archaeological Science.2020.