The Mekong giant salmon carp is four feet long and weighs 66 pounds. It is so elusive — recorded only 30 times by scientists — that they nicknamed it the “Mekong ghost” for the Southeast Asian river that was its habitat.
The evolutionarily distinct carp species, which is not a salmon, but has a salmonlike appearance, had not in fact been spotted by anyone since 2005. Researchers feared it had gone extinct.
But one man kept looking: Chan Sokheng, who had a nearly 30-year career in the Fisheries Administration in Cambodia, and died last year. In 2020, according to conservation colleagues he worked with, he received the call he had been hoping for: A fisherman in northern Cambodia had captured a fish with a sleek silver back, a bolt of yellow across its eye and a pronounced curved jaw: It was the Mekong ghost.
In full: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/science/mekong-giant-salmon-carp-cambodia.html
