The Mekong giant salmon carp, a huge fish native to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, was at one point thought to be extinct. However, in 2020, one of the four-foot-long, 60-pound megafish was hauled in by a fisherman … and sold at a fish market, the New York Times reported.
Luckily for the scientists who have been hunting this rare megafish to confirm that it still exists in the wild, two others were subsequently found and turned over to one researcher — Chan Sokheng, a 30-year veteran of the Fisheries Administration in Cambodia. Sokheng died last year, but not before he was finally able to record the existence of the fish he had spent decades looking for.
Those efforts, which resulted in a study published in the journal Biological Conservation, were also enough for the Mekong giant salmon carp (so named, somewhat confusingly, because it is a carp that looks like a salmon) to be classified as endangered, which could result in additional protections in the Mekong River, where it is primarily located.
"Species like the giant salmon carp are irreplaceable, and without concerted action, they could disappear forever," said Heng Kong, director of the Inland Fisheries Research Institute in Cambodia and one of the co-authors of the study.
The factors that drove the Mekong giant salmon carp to near-extinction are the same ones that have killed off countless river-dwelling species: habitat destruction and dams that have altered the river's natural flow. Those problems have also affected many of the other species in the Mekong River, around 25% of which are found nowhere else on Earth.
"Protecting [the giant salmon carp] habitat would not only secure the future of this rare megafish but could also support other endangered species in the region, contributing to the overall health of the Mekong's freshwater biodiversity," said Michael Grant of the Center for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture in Australia, another of the study's coauthors.
Indeed, just as humans have harmed the well-being of the Mekong giant salmon carp and other species, we also have the ability to help it recover via concerted conservation efforts.
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