Workers collect fish inside an abandoned department store in Bangkok, Thailand January 13, 2015. Staff from Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) office were catching fish on Tuesday at the ground floor of the roofless New World department store that was closed down in 1997. Thousands of fish such as catfishes, fancy carps as well as black and red tilapias were released into the ground floor of the building, flooded with rainwater, as local vendors tried to control mosquitoes in the area, local media reported. BMA recently decided to remove the fish and release the water. (Photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)

Elephants feast on fruits and vegetables during the elephant buffet prior to the start of the 2016 King's Cup Elephant Polo event in Bangkok, Thailand, 10 March 2016. The annual charity event, now in its 14th edition, runs until 13 March and will involve 18 elephants brought from tourist trekking camps in Pattaya as well as some unemployed in Surin. A total of 10 teams encompassing over 40 players will take part in the event directed at raising funds to improve the lives of elephants and elephant conservation. (Photo by Diego Azubel/EPA)

Natural world and wildlife shortlist. Lop Buri in Thailand is home to hundreds of macaques, which local residents consider to be disciples of the Hindu god Hanuman. While some people love them, others fear or even hate them. Despite the inconvenience they often cause, the macaques are generally respected and considered sacred. (Photo by Joan de la Malla/Sony World Photography Awards)

Yingluck Shinawatra reaches out to shakes hands with supporters after speaking at a rally during her election campaign June 29, 2011 in Burirum, Thailand. Thais go to the polls on July 3 to vote in a tight race between Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's Democrats and the red shirt followers of fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south, and Thailand to the west. Its population was estimated to be around 6.5 million in 2012. A third (33%) of the country's population lives below the international poverty line which means living on less than U.S. $1.25 per day.

Tanbo Art is the strategic planting of four varieties of rice which have different colored leaves in order to create a giant image in the rice paddy. This type of aesthetic planting began in the Japanese village of Inakadate in 1993 in order to celebrate the village’s over 2000 year history of rice farming. The practice has spread to other rice cultivating communities in Japan and even other countries such as Thailand and South Korea.

Among the fish populations that could be harmed by the Xayaburi dam in Laos is the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish, considered by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the world’s largest freshwater fish. The fish, which grows to 650 pounds and about 10 feet long, is only found in the Mekong River. It is migratory, moving between downstream habitats in Cambodia upstream to northern Thailand and Laos each year to spawn. Some experts fear the Xayaburi dam could block the migration and drive the giant catfish to extinction. (Photo by Courtesy of Zeb Hogan/University of Nevada, Reno)