1000 Manat Amu Darya sturgeon

The Amu Darya sturgeon (Pseudoscaphirhynchus kaufmanni) is endemic to the Amu Darya river basin and by 2006 was already functionally commercially extinct, its population having collapsed due to Soviet-era water diversion projects that devastated the river system feeding the Aral Sea. Turkmenistan's wildlife commemorative series from this period coincided with early post-Soviet efforts to catalog regional biodiversity losses rather than celebrate abundance.

KM# 102 belongs to a broader run of Turkmen silver issues that were minted largely for the collector export market — domestic circulation of commemorative denominations at this face value was purely nominal.