Ray Achieved A New Guinness World Record For Being The World's Largest Freshwater Fish
Update: 2022-07-04 21:30 IST
Ray Achieved A New Guinness World Record For Being The World’s Largest Freshwater Fish
The largest freshwater fish has achieved Guinness World records on June 13, 2022, by fishermen in the Stung Treng district of northern Cambodia.The female gigantic freshwater stingray measured 3.98 m in length, longer than a pickup truck, and weighed about 300 kg, or about the same as a regular grizzly bear.
The amazing fish, also called a whipray, was 2.2 metres long, which means that if she were to be placed on a ping-pong table, her outer "wings" would dangle over the sides by a foot on each side (30 cm). Due to both her rounded disc-like shape and the early-evening hour of her emergence, the record-breaking ray—a member of an endangered species—was given the nickname Boramy.
The measurements were made by a group of international ichthyologists as part of the US-Cambodian "Wonders of the Mekong" project, in cooperation with the Cambodian Fisheries Administration, despite the fact that the discoveries were made by locals.
Dana Lee, a fisheries biologist from FISHBIO, was one of the researchers that assisted in measuring this river monster. He said that it was a beautiful moment for me to catch the first glimpse of the big stingray as it was hauled from the depths.
He has always thought of the Mekong as a legendary location, and this creature almost seemed to be the river personified. Dr. Zeb Hogan, a specialist in huge fish and director of the "Wonders of the Mekong" initiative as well as the host of the television programme Monster Fish, reiterated this.
This is not the first world record to be broken in the enigmatic, uncharted waters of mainland south-east Asia.
The previous record-holder for the largest freshwater fish was a Mekong gigantic catfish, which was discovered in a different section of the Mekong River in Thailand in June 2005. It weighed in at 293 kg and had a tail length of 2.7 m.
As it is presently too close to call, the Mekong giant catfish and the gigantic freshwater stingray maintain the title for largest freshwater fish species.
They are the favourites in a surpisingly competitive competition. Other candidates include the dog-eating catfish, also known as the paroon shark, a closely related catfish . This massive bottom-feeder is estimated to reach similarly enormous sizes to its cousin, the Mekong giant, and has a comparable geographic range.
Nevertheless, this species was formally recognised as extinct in 2020. It is likely that it went extinct between 2005 and 2010 as a result of overfishing and habitat loss. As a result, it currently retains the unfortunate distinction of being the most recent extinction of freshwater fish.