Image: Team of Jeff Corwin, Animal Planet
Animal Planet personality Jeff Corwin's team snapped this photo of a stingray that is 14 feet in length, 7.9 feet across and approximately 800 pounds. The ray was caught and released recently in the Mae Klong River in Thailand, in water approximately 65-feet deep. The animal is the biggest stingray ever observed by researchers and may be the biggest freshwater fish in the world. The same ray was caught and tagged in 2009.
Zeb Hogan, a National Geographic fellow and a professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno said,
"The team was unable to get an exact weight because it’s really hard to weigh these things without hurting them, because they are such big, awkward animals.Certainly [this] was a huge fish, even compared to other giant freshwater stingrays, and it definitely ranks among the largest freshwater fish in the world.”
Read more on this catch and see a video of another giant stingray at National Geographic and at Jeff Corwin's Facebook page.