GIANT CATFISH PROJECT IN THAILAND

[Guest guest]

Hunt for the big fish becomes a race

By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/24/news/fish.php

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2005

HAT KHRAI, Thailand The monster fish announced itself with four resounding

whacks of its tail, thrashing against the net that had trapped it in the pale

brown water of the Mekong River.

 

It was a fish called the giant catfish and it was the size of a grizzly bear,

taking five boatmen an hour to pull it in and 10 men to lift it when they

reached the shore in this remote village in northern Thailand.

 

It was only after their catch had been chopped into pieces and sold that they

learned how special it was. At 2.7 meters, or 9 feet, long and weighing 293

kilograms, or 646 pounds, it may be the biggest freshwater fish ever recorded.

 

But in one of the world's more surprising mysteries, nobody really knows which

is the biggest species of fish lurking in the waters of the Mekong or the Amazon

or the Yangtze or the Congo or the Colorado or Lake Baikal.

 

When the giant catfish was caught in May, Zeb Hogan, a biologist, rushed here

from an expedition in Mongolia to take a look. It was his first trophy in a

project to identify and study the world's largest freshwater fish in the hope of

protecting their habitats and slowing their extinction.

 

Sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the World Wildlife Fund, Hogan

has embarked on an 18-month expedition that will take him to five continents and

more than a dozen rivers.

 

Some species may already be too rare to study, but he has started with the

Mekong, which he said had seven species of huge fish, more than any other river,

along with at least 750 other species.

 

All of them are threatened, as are fish in rivers all over the world, by

overfishing, pollution and development, including major dam projects.

 

The Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas) may be the first to disappear

from the river, he said. The few that remain can be spotted now only in central

Cambodia and here, just below the Golden Triangle, where northern Thailand, Laos

and Myanmar meet.

 

So far, Hogan said, no one has made a credible claim to top this year's trophy.

It is five times the size of the biggest catfish recorded in the United States,

a 121-pound Mississippi River fish that was also caught in May.

 

 

" I keep expecting people to send me photos or records of larger fish, but nobody

has, " he said. The candidate species must grow to at least 200 pounds or longer

than 6 feet - fish like sturgeon, lungfish, gars, stingrays, carp, salmon, perch

and paddlefish.

 

Already Hogan has a collection of unconfirmed fish stories - 3-meter catfish in

Bulgaria, 500-kilogram stingrays in Southeast Asia and 5-meter arapaima in the

Amazon, none of them well documented.

 

" A lot of people say the arapaima is the largest freshwater fish, but when you

look at the records, there's no reliable record of any over 200 kilograms, and

certainly not over 300 kilograms, " he said.

 

Hogan has his own personal candidates, the Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze and

the giant stingray here in the Mekong.

 

" I saw a stingray in Cambodia in 2003 that was 4.13 meters long, " he said. " It

had a disc 2 meters across and 2 meters long, and the tail was 2.13 meters long.

That fish could have been it, but we couldn't weigh it. It was too big. "

 

When he began to spread the word in Cambodia that he was looking for giant fish,

Hogan said, it was stingray he had in mind. " I thought I'd get 50 phone calls

the first week, but nobody contacted us, " he said. " So they're more rare than I

thought they were. "

 

The giant catfish have been disappearing fast, from more than 60 a year caught

here in the early 1990s to just a few today. Their decline coincides with the

completion of the first of a series of dams being built upriver in southern

China.

 

" The damming and the blasting of rapids have changed the habitat and the river

flow, " said Boonluen Chinarath, the village chief in Hat Khrai, who said he had

caught as many as 100 giant catfish in nearly a half-century of fishing.

 

" The river rises and falls more quickly than before, " he said. " Maybe it's up

today and maybe it's down tomorrow. "

 

Many fish cue their migrations to the rise and fall of the water, Hogan said.

The giant catfish are caught in April and May when they swim upriver to spawn

just north of here.

 

Before he headed out on May 1, one of the fishermen, Thirayuth Panthayom, made

sure luck would be on his side. He said he prayed at the shrine to the God of

Catfish and begged his boat to help him: " Please, Miss Boat, let me catch

something today and I'll sacrifice a chicken for you. "

 

He had only been out for 15 minutes when, he said, he saw the fish smack the

water four times with its tail - " Pung! Pung! Pung! Pung! " It took his crew an

hour to pull it in.

 

His father, as owner of the boat, earned nearly 80,000 baht, or about $2,000,

for the fish from the village fishing association, a fortune in rural Thailand.

Thirayuth, like each of the other four members of the crew, got 7,000 baht of

this, which he said he gave right back to his father.

 

As part of its permit to fish for these endangered catfish, the village

association then sold the fish to the Department of Fisheries, which harvests

their eggs and sperm as part of a captive breeding program.

 

After that, the fish are to be returned to the river. But, as usually happens,

this fish, a female, did not survive the harvesting procedure, in which its

belly is vigorously massaged and manipulated.

 

In the end, the men of the village cut it into giant steaks and sold it. When he

tried a bit, Thirayuth said, it tasted soft and sweet and mild.

 

" It's hard to describe, " he said. " You have to try it yourself. "