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National Geographic

These ancient fish swam with the dinosaurs. They may not survive us.

The river flows vast and soundless. It's December in southern Kazakhstan, and the landscape near the Syr Darya River is smudged in shades of brown and taupe—dormant grasses, silted floodplains, leafless trees. This is not the most picturesque stretch of riverbank, strewn as it is with food wrappers, bottles, a decomposing sedan. Overhead, the sun is obscured by a haze of coal- and woodsmoke. But when it comes to what Bernie Kuhajda is searching for, the spot feels perfect. 'This is the habitat we need,' says Kuhajda, an aquatic conservation biologist with the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. He's hoping to find a species of sturgeon—the Syr Darya—that's native to these waters but hasn't been seen since the 1960s, after a series of Soviet dams was built throughout the river system. Those projects blocked access to the fish's spawning grounds and forever changed the flow of the Syr Darya, which drains from the high peaks of Kyrgyzstan into what is now the remnants of the Aral Sea. If the sturgeon somehow still exists, Kuhajda thinks this silty, shallow expanse of river is where it can be found. (Critically endangered sturgeons threatened by proposed dams in Caucasus.) Some months earlier, Kuhajda had been contacted by the conservation organization Re:Wild, which administers a program to search for what it calls lost species—creatures that haven't been seen for at least a decade and could be extinct, but there's not enough data to be conclusive. The officials at Re:Wild reached out to Kuhajda knowing that he was one of a very small collection of scientists who have ever laid eyes on the Syr Darya sturgeon. As a graduate student in the 1990s, he visited museums in London, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and videotaped 27 spindled specimens, bleached white from years of storage. 'They said, 'You're the expert,' ' Kuhajda says, remembering the call with Re:Wild. 'And I said, 'Well, I've seen them dead in a jar.' '