Freshwater rays? Ha! They’re nothing! Might as well be goldfish for all I care. No, as far as rays go I want something bigger, something meatier. Something like this behemoth.

Caught near Hainan Sanya, China, this massive stingray weighs in at 3300 pounds and measures 16′ 6″ across. The ray, which was caught with a net, took three hours to land. The struggle, unfortunately, killed it. The gargantuan ray was sold for the princely sum of around $1500.00. Stingray meat is a delicacy in many restaurants and the bones and organs are used in Chinese medicine.

Giant Stingray [qq.com] : Weird Asia News

Zeb Hogan, a biologist who is searching for giant freshwater fish as part of the National Geographic Society’s Megafishes project, poses with a 44lb, giant freshwater ray (Himantura chaophraya) caught in the Maeklong River in Thailand. As monstrous as this fish is, Hogan is convinced that there are fish at least ten times larger, having heard stories of “Cambodian fishermen catching rays that weighed over 1,100lb (500kg) with wingspans of 14ft (4.3m).” He admits, however, that in his five years of searching he has yet to find anything quite that large.

The current world record is held by the Mekong giant catfish and Mr Hogan aims to document and protect freshwater giants that weigh at least 200lb (91kg) or measure 6ft (1.83m) long.

[...]

“Of the two dozen or so species of giant fish, about 70 percent are threatened with extinction,” said Mr Hogan, an assistant research professor at the University of Nevada-Reno.

“We’re getting close to the record and I’m very confident that a fish of record size existed,” he said. “The question is whether it still exists.”

Giant freshwater stingray is just a tiddler [Telegraph]