Figure 4. Paul Vecsei on the Fraser River(Canada) holding a white sturgeon.Acipenser transmontanus. Photograph by EugeneHoyano,
August 1990
Theillustrator’snote
world was initiated and delivered with pride to E.K. Balon. It caught him in the middle of a new project, the present
volumeonsturgeons. To join in, I took off to Europe, visiting the sturgeon farm in Hungary and ultimately the Grigore
Antipa Natural History Museum in Bucharest...
I consider dot stippling an unmatched medium in which important characters can be best emphasised. Most of my
illustrations of sturgeons in this volume are images of live specimens, some originally from the wild now kept in ponds,
others already hatchery offspring of wild caught parents. A few are from museum specimens preserved wet. The live
specimens were anesthesized, laid out ona wet surface and then photographed. Care was taken to avoid parallax dis-
tortions by using long focal length lenses.
The resulting slides were projected to facilitate enlarged drawings and detailed rendering of all structures. Often light
glare on mucus or wet surfaces made some structures invisibleonthe photographs. Theses structures had to be drawn from
other frames of the same specimen. Some heads were enlarged up to 15 times so that the finished drawings contain more
information than can be seen by an unaided eye. For example, the two heads ofAcipenser gueldenstaedtiionpage 436
represent over 100 hours of work. The complete views were done only about 45 cm long in order to present enough details
when reproduced at 33% of their original size. My illustrations are exactly what you would see if you step far enough to
avoid parallax distortions and block one eye in order to loose your stereoscopic vision.
15 August 1996 Paul Vecsei
Much time has passed since those rainy nights on the Fraser River. In the meantime my efforts to illustrate charrs of the