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EveryFish

River or lake, India

Corbett and the Ramganga

The Himalayan foothill river inside Corbett National Park, famous for the golden mahseer and the giant goonch.

The Ramganga flows out of the Kumaon Himalaya through Jim Corbett National Park, India's oldest national park, set up in 1936. Its clear, rocky pools and fast runs hold the golden mahseer, the great sporting fish of Himalayan rivers, along with snowtrout and the goonch catfish. The Kosi river on the park's eastern edge, near Ramnagar, is also known for mahseer.

The golden mahseer

The golden mahseer is a large carp with big golden scales and a powerful body that can grow to well over a metre. It moves up Himalayan rivers to spawn in clear tributaries during the monsoon and back to deeper pools in winter. British anglers wrote of it as the finest sporting fish in India. Overfishing, dynamite and poison fishing, sand mining and dams have reduced its numbers, and it is listed as Endangered.

Protected waters

Inside the national park, fishing is banned, which makes the Ramganga one of the safer refuges for mahseer. Outside, several states run conservation and hatchery projects, and some temple stretches of rivers in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh hold tame mahseer that pilgrims feed. Hydropower projects across the Himalaya are the largest long-term threat, because they block migration and change the flow and temperature of the rivers.

Fish of Corbett and the Ramganga

Golden mahseerThe golden mahseer

Still to be written: Bagarius yarrelli, Common snowtrout.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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