Goonch, Mahseer, Yellowcheek, Etc

Some of the best pix of a goonch I have seen. Wade made it famous and it made Wade famous. I remember the mention of it in Wade’s first book, Somewhere down the Crazy River. I have multiple copies. I checked the price of a hardcover copy and it was $500. Wow, I am glad I got it when I did.

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The goonch from River Monsters might have been going by the wrong name for almost 200 years

The goonch is a giant catfish from the rivers of India and Nepal. It was blamed for attacks on the Kali River in the late 1990s, and Jeremy Wade landed one there in 2008 that weighed 161 pounds. Today it is listed as vulnerable because dams and heavy fishing keep shrinking the big rivers it needs.

Last November a team from the College of Fisheries in Datia bought one dead goonch at a fish market in Uttar Pradesh and clipped a small piece of its fin. From that clip they read the fish’s entire mitochondrial genome, all 16,524 letters of it, using a nanopore sequencer. The machine checks the start of every DNA strand and spits out the ones it doesn’t want, so 88 percent of the data was mitochondrial and every letter was read about 346,000 times.

On a family tree of more than 40 catfish, the market fish landed right next to the giant goonch, Bagarius yarrelli. In 2021 two museum experts concluded those are one species, and since bagarius was named first in 1822, that name would win. The DNA fits both answers, so the debate is still open.

The goonch now has a full genetic barcode, which means a bottle of river water could someday reveal whether goonch live there without anyone wetting a line.

Rout et al. 2026, BMC Genomics

Ng & Kottelat 2021, Zootaxa

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I was surprised it was sequenced.

BTW, goonch is one of coolest names I have ever heard.

Speaking of Goonch, this fool was able to buy them so they can escape into the wild in Florida. His channel shows countless other invasives that need to be banned.

Somewhere down the Crazy River was about Mahseer and Goliath Tigerfish. This is one of the nicest Mahseer photos I have seen. This appears to be a mahseer from the Himalaya stocks. I just found out that the Southern Indian fishery has been closed for 10+ years.