For black market caviar in Atyrau, Kazakhstan’s sturgeon capital a few miles from the Caspian Sea, you need go no further than the main Nasikhat market. There, a stout woman standing behind a stall groaning under piles of carp, pike and sturgeon from the nearby Ural River delivers the bad news: beluga caviar now costs $800 a kilo, up from $400 last year and $35 a decade ago. Less sought-after sevruga and osietra caviar cost $500 a kilo.

“If you want to take it out, let me know, I have a friend in Customs at the airport,” she adds helpfully, trying to make a sale. The rise in price in part reflects Atyrau’s rapid development as a booming oil town where more and more people are again able to afford caviar, even at these high prices. Furthermore, Kazakhstan is expected to become one of the world’s top five oil exporters within a decade, with a ratio of oil revenue to population similar to Saudi Arabia’s.

But the high price of caviar also highlights how deeply overfished the world’s last major population of sturgeon has become. The 250-million-year-old species, once plentiful on both U.S. coasts and in Western Europe (where it was even called the common sturgeon, now extinct), has been nearly wiped out in the Caspian Sea over the past 20 years, after a half-century of carefully calibrated fishing during the Soviet period.

The soaring profitability of poaching – a single beluga’s roe can yield a fisherman from $10,000 to $15,000 – and the realization in the fishing community that the sturgeon will soon be gone has led to what fishermen, law-enforcement officers and scientists describe as an unprecedented frenzy of poaching. Just this year, it has involved shootouts, disappearances at sea, law-enforcement agencies accusing each other of poaching and the indictment of the city’s main cannery managers on charges of poaching and worse. It also illustrates why Kazakhstan ranks in the bottom third of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

In January, the financial police arrested a manager of the cannery (the other three fled to Russia) and formally charged the team with what local papers had been reporting for years: fishing at sea “under cover of the scientific catch” a far greater number of sturgeon than was allowed and “forging fishermen’s signatures to show they were caught in the Ural River” and not the sea.

In Soviet times, only the Atyrau branch of the Caspian Fisheries Research Institute, a once-powerful institution whose scientists effectively set catch quotas, were allowed to catch some sturgeon at sea near the delta, where they assemble to wait for the right water temperature to make their voyage hundreds of kilometers upriver to their spawning grounds. Otherwise, sturgeon fishing was done in rivers, and only on alternating days.

“Since the fall of 2004,” a Financial Police statement said, “Atyraubalyk management has used criminal schemes for tax evasion and money laundering and buying sturgeon illegally caught at sea.” As a result, 4.6 tons of caviar and 78 tons of sturgeon meat were impounded.

Atyraubalyk is not the only institution accused of poaching. The Kazakhstani successor agency to the old Soviet KGB spy service, the KNB, issued a statement this spring noting “the increase of illegal fishing in the Caspian Sea and the highly organized criminal nature of poaching.” It warned of such “irreparable consequences” as the extinction of the Caspian sturgeon.

The KNB also accused the Water Police – one of 10 agencies charged with fighting poaching – of “involvement in illegal fishing.”

“Organized provocation!” thundered the head of the water Police, Mereke Izmuratov, to Lev Guzikov, a local journalist who covers poaching in an independent local weekly, Ak Zhaik. “Those who stand behind this activity want to remove me so they can organize large-scale poaching while the fish are still here,” the journalist quoted the official as saying.

A scientist who now works for an oil company reports seeing poachers’ nets at sea as far as 15 km from the Ural River’s mouth. “There is so much competition that they are going after the fish farther and farther away,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Poachers, unable to distinguish between females and males, slice open the bellies of both, a former poacher said and throw the meat away, keeping only the eggs if it’s a female. When this author took a trip at sea near the delta last year, the floating carcasses were almost as numerous as the tell-tale empty plastic bottles that showed the illegal nets’ location.

It’s been three years since the scientific institute, which has since been forced to relocate inside the Atyraubalyk compound, was able to make a count of wild fingerlings. That count indicated that fewer than 300 sturgeon pairs from all three species had succeeded in spawning. How many made it this year is anyone’s guess.