Tracking Mahseer

The question of how best to protect aquatic biodiversity is a pressing one as many countries expand their development that directly impacts rivers. Unfortunately, there is a substantial lack of basic biological information for many freshwater fish, and that hinders conservation efforts and sustainable management plans.  In Bhutan, they are addressing this deficiency of ecological information for their largest and culturally significant fish, the migratory Golden Mahseer. 

The Mahseer Conservation and Research Project was officially launched in March 2015 and was conducted via a partnership between the Fisheries Conservation Foundation, World Wildlife Fund—Bhutan, and the Bhutan Ministry of Agriculture and Forests.  The study used radio telemetry to assess the movements of both Golden Mahseer (Tor putitora) and Chocolate Mahseer (Neolissochilus hexagonolepsis) and was a ground-breaking collaboration for mahseer research as no study of this scope has been attempted before.  Over the course of five years, Mahseer movements were tracked to determine where Mahseer travel during the monsoon season, where they overwinter, and if Mahseer swim across the southern border into India.

The work in Bhutan has served as a model for studying Mahseer and other migratory fish in the region.  In 2018, FCF was part of setting up a telemetry project in the Ngao River in Thailand and in 2020, FCF assisted in a new radio-telemetry study in Pakistan’s Poonch River to understand how Golden Mahseer and snow trout migrations have been altered by the Gulpur Dam.