River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  So how big do piraiba really grow? I met up with Julio Cavalcante, the former owner of a fishing tackle shop in Manaus, who landed a 211-pounder after a two-hour battle in the Rio Madeira. But he reckons there are bigger ones in the famous “meeting of the waters,” where the tea-black Rio Negro meets the brown water of the Amazon and they run alongside each other, scarcely mixing for four miles. He told me he nearly died here once when his line, with a hooked fish on the end, wrapped around him and started to pull him in. He avoided going overboard by cutting the line with his knife. In fact he had vowed never to fish the place again—until we persuaded him to take us there.

  He greeted me with a conspiratorial smile and a sealed metal paint tin. His special bait, he said. Julio is a firm believer that catfish find their food by smell, and he works on that principle to make sure they find his bait. What this meant, when I opened the tin and the layers of plastic bags inside, was that, on encountering his special formula, I could hardly breathe. He’d wrapped each hook in the guts of eight chickens and then left this to bake in the equatorial sun for three days. I fished these baits thirty feet down, suspended under a five-gallon drum, in possibly two hundred feet of water, into and through the night, as riverboats criss-crossed the mile-wide river and storm-clouds piled up over the far bank. But nothing took.

  From conversations with other fishermen, it emerges that piraiba of any size have become very scarce in recent years. They used to catch them with drifting juglines (baits set under a large float), but that doesn’t get results anymore. Now they tend to be caught, infrequently, on multihook longlines, stretched between the bank and a rock on the bottom. I recall something I saw when traveling on a small boat up the Rio Purus at the end of my first Amazon trip. On a beach up ahead, a man looking like an Indian sadhu—straggling hair, sun-blackened skin, something like a loincloth around his middle—was doing a strange dance. Again and again he staggered forward then shuffled unsteadily backward in a rhythm that had a certain familiarity. Then, as we passed—one hundred yards wide of him so as not to ground on the shallows—a gray fish a yard and a half long slid kicking onto the sand. As this tableau shrunk to a speck behind us, I saw a flash as a machete blade reflected the early-morning sun. But since then I’ve not seen any piraiba caught from the Purus, which tallies with the fact that it’s one of the most heavily fished Amazon tributaries. But I have seen a couple jump there, which piraiba are known to do occasionally, although the reason is not known. This is probably what the “lunging” fish that Roosevelt reported was doing. The fishermen who responded to this perceived attack with their machetes just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The picture on the Rio Araguaia is slightly better, and this is where I finally achieved my ambition of hooking one of these rare predators. But I made a mistake. As the fish tore off, I skinned my thumb in my efforts to bring it to a halt. When we’d drifted down on top of it, something didn’t feel right. The fish would pull out a few yards, and I’d wrestle some back, but the line stayed in the same position, and my connection to the fish didn’t feel direct. The line had gone round something, but it didn’t feel like a tree branch. “Espinhel,” said Wilson, my boatman. The fish had gone under the main rope of a longline, which shouldn’t have been there. So I lost the fish, which Wilson, who once caught a seven-foot monster, estimated at over two hundred pounds. I later learned that you don’t have to hang on quite so hard on the first run as long as you’ve got plenty of line and a quick-release knot to your anchor buoy or mooring tree. Piraiba are renowned for their great strength, but they mainly pull down and try to keep in the main river channel. They will not make for bank-side snags, even though they could easily reach them if they tried. Some would call this dumb; others say it’s fighting clean. Even staying in open water, there are stories of anglers giving up and cutting the line after a fish has exhausted all three or four boat occupants over the course of several hours. With my tactics perfected, I’ve since caught a couple of piraiba with Wilson, weighing close to a hundred pounds, but I can’t say that’s compensated for the lost fish....

  To try to catch a piraiba for television, I went to the Rio Teles Pires. A decade before, a fish had been caught here that needed four people to lift it. To get to the river, I had the second-scariest light-plane flight of my life with cameraman James Bickersteth as the weather closed in around us and obscured the jungle airstrip. Twice the pilot circled away while frowning at his watch, the fuel gauges, and the fading daylight. I told him that if we had to go back that was okay, although there were storms behind us now too. On our fourth pass, the weather ahead looked unchanged, but I heard a voice mutter, “Right, let’s try and get this thing down.” As we banked to start our descent toward rocky pinnacles below, the wind landed a punch that almost turned my stomach inside out. A couple of minutes later, as we bumped and yawed, the trees rose up on either side and we slid into contact with a blur of red mud. No sooner had we come to a stop than the pilot jumped out and lit a cigarette. Later I asked James what was going through his head. He looked at me and said quietly, “I had made my peace.”

  But such isolation has its benefits. Commercial fishermen can’t get in by land or water thanks to hostile terrain and unnavigable rapids. At a deep roiling pool below a fall, with the bait on the edge of the main current, something almost tore the rod out of the holder in the boat’s gunwale. Once I’d managed to transfer the rod to the padded rest between my thighs and clip the shoulder harness to the reel, I felt more in control. However, even though I was now putting my back into it with over-the-top one hundred–pound monofilament, the fish refused to come off the bottom. From its behavior, I judged it was clearly a big piraiba, so I told myself to stay calm and not rush things but instead maintain a constant pressure without wearing myself out. As the fight wore on, I sensed the fish starting to tire, and, after a while, it was underneath the boat. As it rose a bit more I strained for my first glimpse, and what I saw when it broke the surface was a shock. This was not a piraiba at all. The fish before me was a pirarara, which roughly translates as “parrot fish” because it incorporates the word arara, the indigenous name for the vividly colored macaw. In English it’s the red-tailed catfish (Phractocephalus hemiliopterus), and it’s every bit as unmistakable as its avian counterpart. Besides its tail, its main feature is its great head, which makes up nearly one-third of its body. Its body markings are also very distinct, with a sharp delineation between its dark back, the color of an old leather jacket, and its bright off-white belly. They are also very vocal, making a rhythmic bellowing sound when lifted from the water, the result of air being expelled through the gill-flaps. But what shocked me about this fish was its size. I’d caught many red-tails before, most of them around twenty pounds, several around thirty, and the biggest between fifty and sixty. But this dwarfed them all, so we put it in the sling and watched the needle on the scales swing round to eighty pounds, ample compensation for catching the “‘wrong” species.

  I also caught a few jaú, to sixty pounds, similar in shape to pirarara but dark greeny-brown all over, smoother skinned, and with a liking for rocks—so much so that I caught a forty-pounder in some crazy rapids where nothing had any right to survive.

  But piraiba are not so straightforward. Typically, you’ve got to position your bait at long range in strong flow on heavy tackle but in a sensitive manner. This is not always easy. Then it’s about being in the right place at the right time. More often than not, nothing comes along. But the fishing gods saw fit to smile on me. In two weeks I intercepted four. The biggest turned out to be the first, hooked in a wide, deep stretch near a small Indian settlement. Immediately it headed for the middle of the river, announcing its identity as clearly as could be. I was fishing a 150-pound braided line with several yards of thick 100-pound monofilament on the business end before the wire leader to give a combination of easy fishability with some abrasion resistance, because there were unseen boulders scattered on the bottom here. Getting the fis
h off the bottom took a long time, and then it resisted every inch of the way until I finally saw its streamlined body about to break the surface. Then it was alongside the boat, rolling onto its side, and I was able to grab it by its thick pectoral spines and haul it into the boat. As I did so, it appeared to growl at me, but in fact it was belching air from its expanded swim bladder. Weighing in at 72 pounds and measuring five feet long, it was a big, powerful fish, certainly big enough for our film. But as piraiba go, this was a tiny one. And looking at this fish, with that in mind, I found I couldn’t write off as fantasy or hallucination those stories of big piraiba taking people down.

  What’s more, there are still a few big piraiba around. In 2007 a fish measuring seven and a half feet was caught from the Teles Pires and estimated at 375 pounds. The Czech angler Jakub Vagner recently caught one measuring eight feet, eight inches and estimated at 475 pounds. Meanwhile the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) has recognized as its new all-tackle record a fish caught in May 2009 from the Rio Solimões (the middle reach of the Amazon) that weighed 341 pounds, 11 ounces, although from the looks of the photo, this fish likely did not survive. And five years ago I heard about a remote stretch of jungle river where extremely big catfish, almost certainly piraiba, had smashed up insanely strong fishing tackle. Since then I’ve been desperate to get there, but other commitments have prevented me so far. (There is a very limited window each year when the water conditions are right.) It’s very high up on my bucket list, as long as time doesn’t run out for the piraiba first.

  Giant piraiba are simply astounding—twice my weight or more—and their muscle power is legendary. In terms of a physical endurance test for an angler, surely there can be nothing tougher in a river. They have unceremoniously sunk the canoes of local handliners, and to meet one at close quarters in the water, regardless of its intentions toward you or lack of them, would be terrifying. And anybody who is skeptical of the stories of piraiba swallowing people would likely reconsider if ever in this position. For sheer size, power, demeanor, and rarity, I long thought that a giant piraiba would tick more boxes than any fish I would likely find in a river. Only after a long gray-and-white shape had pulled my boat five miles in three and a half hours on another continent would I revise that opinion.

  CHAPTER 7

  CANDIRU

  Most journeys, I think, begin and all end with a sense of unreality.

  Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, 1934

  MOST FISH THAT ARE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS to humans are monsters in terms of size, capable of biting, butting or grabbing us, and they are far stronger than us in the water. But a few small fish are every bit as monstrous in their own bloodthirsty way.

  One pocket-sized fish that is guaranteed to put the willies up anybody who hears about it is the candiru. In the popular mythology of the Amazon, this fish swims up the urine stream of men who are unwary and uncouth enough to relieve themselves in the river. Like salmon surging up a waterfall, they too are homing in on the smell of chemicals in the water, driven by a basic urge. But unlike the king of fish, they are not driven to breed but to feed, although to the victim this is in effect a bizarre and painful form of sexual assault, as the fish disappears from sight up his urethra.

  This fish sounds like a very good reason for not going anywhere near the Amazon.

  One day, on my first Amazon trip, Martin asked a passing fisherman if there were candiru here in this stretch of the Rio Purus.

  “Sure,” he said. “Do you want to see some?”

  He picked up his machete and casually hacked off the head of a sixty-pound red-tailed catfish that was in his canoe, hooked it firmly to one of his handlines, and lobbed it into the river. He then sat holding the line, and after five minutes he pulled it in, quickly and smoothly, hand-over-hand. As he swung it onto the riverbank, I saw that parts of the head were moving. Pale, finger-sized shapes fell out of its gills and mouth and flopped on the mud, where he scooped them up into the bowl-shaped gourd that he used for baling his canoe.

  I picked one up, gripping hard to stop it from wriggling free, and it responded by vomiting circular gobbets of meat the same diameter as its mouth. With its soft, scaleless skin, it didn’t feel like a fish at all but, disconcertingly, like the body part it is alleged to invade. Its short, fine whiskers identified it as a catfish, but its eyes were minute even by catfish standards, like tiny reflective pinheads. We asked if the stories about this fish were true, and the man said he knew of two women who had been penetrated when bathing in the river. But when we asked about men, he said no. That’s another type, smaller and thinner. He didn’t know how to catch this other type, at least not in a way that didn’t involve becoming a victim. But I discovered a technique a few years later.

  I was fishing the Rio Araguaia from an alloy skiff that had one of its bench seats modified into a live well, into which we’d put a couple of silvery papa-terra fish for catfish bait. On the floor of this tank were two small valves, an inch across, that allowed water to circulate and stay fresh. After an hour’s fishing, I opened the lid to check inside and was shocked to find many more fish than we had started with. The swarming newcomers were the length of a toothpick and must have squeezed in through the tiny gaps in the valves, having located the captive papa-terra by smell—a revoltingly impressive feat. I scooped one out with an aquarist’s net and put it on my hand, where it shot forward with alarming speed and tried to burrow into the cranny between two of my fingers. Scarcely overcoming my revulsion, I repositioned it and saw how it moved by wriggling its head from side to side, thereby “walking” with the tiny, backward-facing spines on its gill flaps, like a commando crawling on his elbows.

  Normally the candiru would swim and wriggle inside the gill flap of a larger fish as the flap briefly opens to expel water that has passed over the gills. This water has lost some of its oxygen to the fish’s bloodstream and also picked up small quantities of waste materials, ammonia and urea—the trace chemicals that, biologists think, lead the candiru to its target. Once inside the gill flap, the host’s most vulnerable boundary layer is exposed: the complex system of thin membranes across which oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the fish’s blood and the surrounding water. Here the candiru hooks itself into position so that the strong current that pulses through the gills does not blow it out, and it bites into the delicate tissue, rich in blood capillaries. Gorging on its host’s blood, it expands to almost twice its body size before detaching and returning to open water.

  With the candiru hanging from my hand by one of its spines, I could now see why they say that this fish, Vandellia cirrhosa, can only be removed by surgery if it ever finds its way into a narrow human orifice. But has that ever happened? Reliable evidence is hard to come by in the Amazon. However, for the filming of River Monsters we tracked down the victim of one attack that was very reliably documented, right down to internal video footage. Silvio Barbosa took me to the very spot where he was bathing with some friends in October 1997 on the banks of the main Amazon River at the town of Itacoatiara. The water is a turbid yellowy-brown, and you reach it by picking your way down a gloopy mud riverbank—hardly Copacabana or Ipanema, but even landlocked Brazilians are drawn to the local beach on weekends. Silvio and his friends had had a few cold beers, so after a while Silvio needed to answer the call of nature. He knew of the candiru’s reputation, so he made a point of standing up, he says, in water that came up to the middle of his thighs.

  He felt something that at first wasn’t painful, and he looked down to see about an inch of the fish still visible outside his urethra. He tried to grab it, but it was too slippery to hold, and after a few moments it had vanished completely inside him.

  Whatever he felt then, it got much worse. At the first hospital he went to, they didn’t believe his story. Meanwhile, his bladder felt on the point of bursting because he was unable to urinate. He developed a fever and started to pass blood and pus. Three days later, his abdomen horribly swollen, he traveled 150 miles to
Manaus, to the clinic of urologist Dr. Anoar Samad. Medical textbooks did not cover this condition, but something had to be done urgently. After putting Silvio under general anesthetic, Dr. Samad inserted an endoscope into the urethra and found the fish, which the sphincter below the bladder had blocked from further progress. By this point the candiru had died from lack of oxygen—not a problem it has inside its normal host—and to Dr. Samad, it looked as if it had tried to gnaw its way out through the side of the urethra. Aware that the fish wouldn’t normally come out backward, he was considering making an incision in the patient’s groin, through which he could pull it out head-first. However, by this time the fish had started to decompose, so by grasping the fish near its tail with the pincers on the endoscope and irrigating the urethra with distilled water, Dr. Samad was able to ease it out in reverse.

  Silvio came round and, after a course of antibiotics, made a full recovery. He was happy enough to talk to us about what had happened eleven years before and even feature in an impressionistic reconstruction that used a squeezy plastic bottle of river water, although some worried that even this might offend the sensibilities of a prime-time audience. But our director Barny Revill still felt that this was all rather abstract for television and thought of the plan to reunite Silvio with his fish. His candiru, it turned out, still existed, although in a dead state in a jar of alcohol at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus.

  On the day in question, Silvio seemed to be scanning the shelves rather eagerly. But with thousands of specimens in the temperaturecontrolled storeroom, we were confident he wouldn’t find what he was looking for before we had the camera rolling. When the moment came, he declined the invitation to hold it or even touch it, and instead he just stared at it in my hand.