This book is the first comprehensive description of development of the Acipenserid fish published in the English language. It con tains the results of more than 40 years of studies by the authors and their colleagues. My own life in science has been intimately related both with the authors and the fish, which are the subject of this book. Therefore, it gives me a great pleasure to present to the English reader an expanded version of the book. Those interested in the history of biology must be well aware of the fact that genetics in the USSR was practically demolished by Lysenko at the session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1948. However, it is much less well known that other fundamental branches of biology were also persecuted at that time, experimental embryology (developmental mechanics) among them. As a result, many embryologists, in cluding the authors of this book, were forced to turn to more ap plied problems, this being the only way to continue research. They had to abandon amphibians and concentrate their efforts on sturgeon."

Fish resources in natural water bodies are tending to decrease due to intensified fishing, the extensive construction of hydropower plants on rivers, and the pollution of seas and freshwater basins by indus trial and agricultural wastes. Nowadays only artificial fish rearing can meet man's requirements in fish products. Fish breeding is still very young as compared to plant breeding and animal husbandry. Although fishes have been reared artificially since ancient times in certain Asian countries, this usually included the cultivation of embryos and larvae caught in rivers and lakes. Among the exceptions, only the common carp Cyprinus carpio and the domesticated variety of the crucian carp, the goldfish Carassius auratus, which were cultivated in the East, may be mentioned. Com mon carp breeding began in China about 2000 years ago but was la ter banned by one of the emperors and started again only relatively recently. The goldfish has been cultivated for decorative purposes for about 1000 years. Many remarkable varieties of the goldfish have been developed in China and later in Japan. The first improved breeds (German "races") of the common carp known in Europe appeared after the domestication of the Da nube wild carp in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Local breeds of the carp were probably established somewhat later in Chi na, Japan and Indonesia; even now these breeds have only minor differences as compared to their ancestor, the Asian wild carp.