Fisherman hold net with massive stingray encircling the front half.

Why we still haven’t caught the world’s largest fish

Nat Geo Explorer Zeb Hogan has spent decades asking the question. “I thought there would be a simple answer,” he now concedes, after recording a 661-pound stingray. “I was wrong.”

Scientists tag and release a giant freshwater stingray in the Chao Phraya River Basin in central Thailand. The endangered species occurs in large rivers from India to Indonesia.​
Photograph Courtesy of Zeb Hogan

Two decades ago, Zeb Hogan was working on Southeast Asia’s Mekong River when he got the idea for the Megafishes Project, a quest to find, study and protect the world’s largest freshwater fishes. At the heart of the project was the question: Which species is the largest? “I thought there would be a simple answer,” says Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno. “I was wrong.”

For years, he scoured Earth’s waterways, often as the host of Nat Geo Wild’s “Monster Fish” show. Although he came close on many occasions, he could not find a fish with a verified weight greater than a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish caught in Thailand

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