This is the first in a continuing series on the Megafishes Project. Join National Geographic News on the trail with project leader Zeb Hogan as he tracks down the world's largest freshwater fishes.
A thick, polluting haze envelops the Three Gorges Dam, blurring the view of the world's largest hydroelectric station.
But for Zeb Hogan, a fisheries biologist with the University of Reno, in Nevada, seeing the 1.5-mile-wide (2.5-kilometer-wide) dam from the banks of the Yangtze River brings into sharp focus the threats facing the animals he has set out to study: the world's largest freshwater fishes.
"From the point of view of the fish, there's nothing worse than a dam," he said.
"Dams block upstream migration, destroy spawning habitat, and can turn large stretches of river into ecological wastelands."
Earlier this year Hogan launched the Megafishes Project, a three-year effort funded by the National Geographic Society to document the 20-some species of giant fish found around the world. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
Megafishes live in rivers and lakes and grow to at least 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length or 220 pounds (100 kilograms) in weight.
Hogan calls the giant fish "the real-life Loch Ness monsters and Bigfoots of the aquatic world." (See photos of the "monster" fishes.)
Hogan's mission has brought him to the Yangtze River, home to the Chinese sturgeon and Chinese paddlefish—ancient leviathans that were once plentiful in the world's third-longest river but are now on the brink of extinction (see China map).
The Chinese paddlefish, which can grow to be 23 feet (7 meters) long and weigh 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms), may be the largest freshwater fish in the world.
But no one has seen one in the Yangtze since 2003.
"Everywhere around the world these large fish are in big trouble," said Hogan, who is a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.
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