Fisher on the Mekong River caught a large stingray that weighed virtually 300kg.
A fisher in Cambodia has caught what scientists say is the world’s largest recorded freshwater fish, a large stingray.
Captured on June 13, the stingray measured virtually 4 metres (13 toes) from snout to tail and weighed barely lower than 300kg (660lbs), in keeping with a press release on Monday by Wonders of the Mekong, a joint Cambodian-US analysis challenge.
The earlier report for a freshwater fish was a 293-kg (646-lb) Mekong big catfish, found in Thailand in 2005, the group mentioned.
Christened “Boramy”- that means the complete moon within the Khmer language – due to her bulbous form, the stingray was caught south of Stung Treng on the Mekong River in northeastern Cambodia. It took a few dozen males to haul the fish ashore.
They alerted a close-by workforce of scientists from the Wonders of the Mekong challenge, which has publicised its conservation work in communities alongside the river.
The scientists arrived inside hours of getting a post-midnight name with the information, and have been amazed at what they noticed.
“Whenever you see a fish this measurement, particularly in freshwater, it’s arduous to grasp, so I feel all of our workforce was shocked,” Wonders of the Mekong chief Zeb Hogan mentioned in a web-based interview from the College of Nevada in Reno.
Freshwater fish are outlined as people who spend their complete lives in freshwater, versus big marine species equivalent to bluefin tuna and marlin, or fish that migrate between contemporary and saltwater like beluga sturgeon.
The invention of the stingray was not nearly setting a brand new report.
“The truth that the fish can nonetheless get this huge is a hopeful signal for the Mekong River, ” Hogan mentioned, noting that the waterway faces many environmental challenges.
The Mekong River runs by China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It’s residence to a number of species of big freshwater fish however environmental pressures are rising. Particularly, scientists concern a serious programme of dam constructing in recent times could also be significantly disrupting spawning grounds.
“Large fish globally are endangered. They’re high-value species. They take a very long time to mature. So in the event that they’re fished earlier than they mature, they don’t have an opportunity to breed,” Hogan mentioned. “Loads of these huge fish are migratory, so that they want giant areas to outlive. They’re impacted by issues like habitat fragmentation from dams, clearly impacted by overfishing. So about 70 % of big freshwater fish globally are threatened with extinction, and the entire Mekong species.”
The workforce that rushed to the positioning inserted a tagging machine close to the stingray’s tail earlier than releasing it. The machine will ship monitoring info for the following 12 months, offering unprecedented knowledge on its behaviour.
“The large stingray is a really poorly understood fish. Its title, even its scientific title, has modified a number of instances within the final 20 years,” Hogan mentioned. “It’s discovered all through Southeast Asia, however now we have virtually no details about it. We don’t find out about its life historical past. We don’t find out about its ecology, about its migration patterns.”
Researchers say it’s the fourth big stingray reported in the identical space prior to now two months, all of them females. They assume this can be a spawning hotspot for the species.
The fisher who caught Boramy, along with the honour of getting caught the record-breaker, was compensated on the market price, that means he obtained a cost of about $600.
