Wallagonia leerii
species of fish
Wallagonia leerii, also known as the Tapah and formerly the striped wallago catfish, is a species of catfish native to Southeast Asia. Its habitat ranges from the river drainages of Thailand through the Malayan peninsula to the islands of Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia. It can grow up to 2 m (6 ft 7 in) in length and weigh up to 150 kg (330 lb). It has been used as food in Southeast Asia since ancient times. Overfishing for its prized meat has caused the population to significantly decrease. Furthermore, the breeding migration pattern of this fish is especially vulnerable to damming, which has also decreased the wild population significantly.
Until osteological research validated the genus Wallagonia in 2014, W. leerii was included in the genus Wallago.
The other two species of the genus Wallagonia, W. micropogon from the Mekong river basin and W. maculatus from the Kinabatangan river basin on Borneo, are currently considered as distinct species. There are, however, strong suspicions that these may in fact be subspecies of W. leerii, as the sole difference seems to lie in a slightly different coloration.
Description
The Tapah is a large fish, commonly attaining lengths of 150 centimetres and a mass of up to 86 kilograms.
The public source identifies “Wallagonia leerii” as species of fish. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wallagonia, leerii and species.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5689129. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wallagonia leerii” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.