The Mekong big salmon carp, an enormous fish native to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, was at one level considered extinct. However, in 2020, one of many four-foot-long, 60-pound megafish was hauled in by a fisherman … and bought at a fish market, the New York Times reported.
Luckily for the scientists who’ve been looking this uncommon megafish to substantiate that it nonetheless exists within the wild, two others have been subsequently discovered and turned over to 1 researcher — Chan Sokheng, a 30-year veteran of the Fisheries Administration in Cambodia. Sokheng died final 12 months, however not earlier than he was lastly in a position to document the existence of the fish he had spent many years in search of.
Those efforts, which resulted in a research revealed within the journal Biological Conservation, have been additionally sufficient for the Mekong big salmon carp (so named, considerably confusingly, as a result of it’s a carp that appears like a salmon) to be labeled as endangered, which may end in extra protections within the Mekong River, the place it’s primarily positioned.
“Species like the large salmon carp are irreplaceable, and with out concerted motion, they may disappear endlessly,” stated Heng Kong, director of the Inland Fisheries Research Institute in Cambodia and one of many co-authors of the research.
The components that drove the Mekong big salmon carp to near-extinction are the identical ones which have killed off numerous river-dwelling species: habitat destruction and dams which have altered the river’s pure circulate. Those issues have additionally affected most of the different species within the Mekong River, round 25% of that are discovered nowhere else on Earth.
“Protecting [the giant salmon carp] habitat wouldn’t solely safe the way forward for this uncommon megafish however may additionally help different endangered species within the area, contributing to the general well being of the Mekong’s freshwater biodiversity,” stated Michael Grant of the Center for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture in Australia, one other of the research’s coauthors.
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Indeed, simply as people have harmed the well-being of the Mekong big salmon carp and different species, we even have the power to assist it get better by way of concerted conservation efforts.
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