Endangered
Giant freshwater stingray
Urogymnus polylepis
Giant freshwater stingray, also called Baya gawiy, is a stingray in the family Dasyatidae (order Myliobatiformes) — Urogymnus polylepis, recorded as Endangered and tied to Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Appearance
The elongated snout has a wide base and a sharply pointed tip that projects beyond the disc. There are five pairs of gill slits on the ventral side of the disc. The thin, cylindrical tail measures 1.8–2.5 times as long as the disc and lacks fin folds.
At up to 38 cm (15 in) long, the spine is the largest of any stingray species. The widest freshwater fish in the world, this species grows up to 2.2 m (7.2 ft) across and can exceed 300 kg (660 lb) in weight.
Range and habitat
The giant freshwater stingray is known to inhabit several large rivers and associated estuaries in Indochina and Borneo. In Indochina, it occurs in the Mekong River to potentially as far upstream as Chiang Khong in Thailand, as well as in the Chao Phraya, Nan, Mae Klong, Bang Pakong, and Tapi Rivers, also found in Bueng Boraphet but now completely extinct. In Borneo, this species is found in the Mahakam River in Kalimantan and the Kinabatangan and Buket Rivers in Sabah. It is reportedly common in the Kinabatangan River but infrequently caught.
GBIF currently lists 83 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The diet of the giant freshwater stingray consists of small, benthic fishes and invertebrates such as crustaceans and molluscs, that it can detect using its electroreceptive ampullae of Lorenzini. This species does not appear to be diadromous (migrating between fresh and salt water to complete its life cycle).
In crisis
As a result, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed the giant freshwater stingray as Endangered.
Giant freshwater stingray is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Giant freshwater stingray, Wikidata item Q46608149 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
