Weight and length measurements for 37 Mekong River fish species of the ‘Dai’ fishery

The Lower Mekong Basin supports some of the world’s largest and most
diverse inland fisheries by supplying nutrition to over 60 million people
and an estimated 11 billion USD of economic activity each year. Despite
the nutritional and economic importance of the fishery, there are limited
data available on which fishery officers and managers can build fishery
stock management plans. Traditional fishery stock management relies on
models of individual and population growth that in turn rely on robust
individual-based data sets, preferably collected over long time scales.
One such fishery for which there are robust data sets are for the “dai,”
or bagnet, fishery located on the Tonle Sap River that connects the Mekong
River mainstream with the Tonle Sap Lake. However, datasets from the dai
fishery are not publicly available, limiting their utility for
understanding how catches in this fishery have changed over time. Several
papers have utilized the data from the dai fishery, but none have made the
data publicly available. By partnering with commercial fishers who
participate in the dai fishery and in partnership with the Cambodian
Department of Fisheries and the Inland Fisheries Research and Development
Institute we collected weight and length data bi-monthly for fish captured
at two dai operations starting in November 2020 and continuing to February
2021, totaling 32,274 measurements of length and weight for 37 species.
Here we report weight and length data for individuals captured during this
timeframe as well as calculated weight-length relationships for total
length and standard length for all 37 species for which there were ³30
measurements. Plots of all weight-length regressions are also included in
the data package. Finally, we report equations for converting standard
length measurements to total length estimates and vice versa.