Hun Sen said Thursday he had decided to cancel the new decree because "dolphins keep dying and thousands of fishing families were affected". "We want to protect dolphins that are at risk of becoming extinct, but dolphins keep dying," he said at an event in Phnom Penh.
Their population has been in steady decline since the first census was taken in 1997, dropping from 200 that year to around 90 currently due to habitat loss and destructive fishing practices.
The World Wildlife Fund said the cause of the latest death is believed to be entanglement in an illegal fishing line. The organization says it spotlights the need for law enforcement to help save the species, also known as the Mekong River dolphin.
Overfishing, regional hydropower dam development and global climate change have pushed the lake into ecological crisis, and fishing communities are sinking into despair.
Developers last week started razing privatised areas around the more than 2,000-hectare Phnom Tamao forest area, an hour drive from capital Phnom Penh, and home to many rare and endangered wildlife including sambar deer at the zoo.
The programme has released more than 40 other animals and birds including silvered langurs, muntjac deers, smooth-coated otters, leopard cats, civets, wreathed hornbills, and green peafowl.
Wonders of the Mekong, a joint Cambodian-U.S. research project, says the stingray, captured a week ago, measured almost four meters (13 feet) from snout to tail and weighed slightly under 300 kilograms (660 pounds).
The Wildlife Conservation Society coordinated the release of 580 hatchlings, which can grow to a length of up to 200cm (78 inches) and mainly live buried in the sand and the water, surfacing only twice a day to breathe.
The stingray was accidentally caught by fishermen in an 80-meter (260 ft) deep pool in the Mekong in Cambodia's northeastern Stung Treng province and the visiting scientists helped return the animal alive.
Researchers, who published their findings Thursday in the journal Nature, used a model to examine how over 3,000 mammal species might migrate and and share viruses over the next 50 years if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which recent research shows is possible.
Abby Seiff, author of a new book called “Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and A Vanishing World in Cambodia,” discusses the future of the Tonle Sap Lake.
In about half the cases where numbers of insects had plummeted, researchers found climate change and habitat loss from agriculture magnifying each other. In more than a quarter of the cases of biodiversity loss, meaning fewer species, the same dynamic was at work.
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