A fisherman in northern Cambodia caught a huge stingray next to an island in the Mekong River, and the team that helped install the tracker said it was the world's largest freshwater fish, weighing 661 pounds (about 300 kilograms) and 13 feet (about 4 meters) long. Stingray Avenue requires almost 14 to 16 people to fully surround it, and the research team said that the world still does not know much about stingray, and has now assisted in releasing it for follow-up studies.
According to comprehensive foreign cables, Moul Thun, a 42-year-old fisherman in Cambodia, caught a giant stingray in the Hexi Island area of the Mekong River near the capital of Stung Treng on the evening of the 13th of this month, and immediately contacted researchers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project "Wonders of Mekong" early the next morning. The research team arrived at the site to help measure the stingray's weight and length, and assisted in releasing the stingray after the tracker was installed. The research team said the stingray was in good health when it was released and expects it to continue to survive.
Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist on the team from the University of Nevada, said that humans have caught the world's largest freshwater fish that broke records, but their understanding of it is still very weak, so they installed a tracker that emits sound signals on it, allowing researchers to continuously track the dynamics and learn more about the habits of species in the Mekong River.
The Wonder Mekong team has previously embarked on a programme in northern Cambodia to install receivers at the bottom of the Mekong River to track migratory fish. Hogan said the Mekong River is quite long, and there are many deep pools in between, as deep as 90 meters.
