River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  “I never realized it was so big,” he gasped. “I didn’t really see it properly before.” He explained that at the time, he’d still been groggy from the anesthetic and only saw something vague in a jar. This fish was 5.26 inches long, with a head 0.45 inches wide—a giant compared to those that I’d seen in the live well and, later, falling out of the gills and mouths of catfish I caught, often leaking blood onto my hands if I picked them up. And once I saw several that were somehow attached to the flanks of a red-tailed catfish I’d caught. Presumably, as they were “empty” and translucent, they were waiting to move forward and enter the gills. The catfish waited without struggling for a few extra moments before being returned, grunting quietly, as I flicked the parasites off.

  Silvio’s story, although gruesome, had a happy ending—for him at least. But if he had lived further from specialist medical attention, there’s no doubt that he could have died. This doesn’t mean that he feels like a lucky man. When I asked Dr. Samad to quantify the likely levels of pain experienced, he replied, “This is somebody who has already paid for all his sins, in this life and the next.”

  So there’s no recorded case of the Vandellia candiru causing a human fatality, although in more remote parts of the Amazon there have likely been unreported cases in which both parties have paid the ultimate price for their respective mistakes. However, tucked away on a nearby shelf in the INPA storeroom, there are some other fish that are on record as being implicated in suspected homicides.

  Dr. Elizabeth Bezerra is a forensic pathologist who used to work at the Medical-Legal Institute (IML) in Manaus. At the rear of the building, away from those awaiting news or called in to identify a family member, is an entrance where anonymous box vans unload steel trays containing the corpses of those who have died in suspicious circumstances. Gunshot wounds are commonplace. On the day I was there, a suspected drug dealer in his twenties was wheeled past, his body bouncing slightly as the trolley turned the corner into the examination room, as if he was merely asleep. His was a straightforward case of a gangland turf war settled in the most common way. I found myself thinking of him getting up in the morning, expecting another normal day.

  Other cases, however, are less open-and-shut. One corpse that Dr. Bezerra examined some years before had what looked like gunshot entry wounds, half an inch in diameter. What was truly horrifying, though, was that the body had been hollowed out. Nothing remained inside the ribcage and abdominal cavity except a couple of small catfish. She sent these fish to INPA, who identified them as the other, fatter type of candiru, the one I’d first seen on the Rio Purus. Local people know this fish as the candiru-açu (pronounced “‘assu,” or “candy-roo AQ” if you’re Ice Cube’s character in the dreadful film Anaconda), which means “big candiru.” Its body shape is also very different from the smaller candiru. The local people have grouped them together on account of their similar bad habits, but genetically they are not closely related. It’s a good example of how everyday names can be confusing and of the need for scientific names.

  Scientists assign the smaller, bloodsucking candiru to the family Trichomycteridae. Within this family, just a handful of species in the genus Vandellia are bloodsuckers along with probably some members of the genus Stegophilus. The remaining 150-odd species feed on detritus and aquatic insects. The bigger, flesh-eating candiru belongs to the family Cetopsidae, the whale catfishes. Cetopsids feed on dead or dying fish, often entering their thick-skinned prey by way of the anus. Although they don’t work quite as quickly or as surgically as piranhas, on many occasions I’ve had a deadbait reduced to little more than a skeleton by the attentions of these fish.

  The most voracious Cetopsid species is Cetopsis candiru, the fish from inside the empty corpse that INPA identified for pathologist Dr. Bezerra. Their normal feeding behavior is to bite and simultaneously twist, thereby cutting a circular hole half an inch in diameter. Once one has gained entry, others follow through the same hole. One two-gallon jar at INPA contains over one hundred of these fish, all retrieved from the hollowed-out body of a caiman. I have also tempted some of these flesh-eaters to feed out of my hand off the side of a floating hut one night, despite noise and camera lights. So intent were they that I even lifted some of them out of the water and onto the deck of the house, still with their jaws fastened into their meal, a small dead fish. Knowing this behavior, to find a drowned human corpse that had been fed on by these fish would not be a surprise. But the condition of the skin in the corpse Dr. Bezerra examined suggested that the entry wounds had been made when the victim was alive.

  This raised the unthinkable possibility of a fish potentially more deadly than the piranha. But although the victim might have been alive when the candiru attacked, he was likely already in distress or injured. Since that first case that alerted the scientific world to this phenomenon, Dr. Bezerra has seen the same thing several times. “Monday is the worst day,” she told me. “People go to the river on the weekend, have a picnic and a drink, get into trouble while swimming, and drown. A day later the body comes up to the surface and they bring it to us.”

  At present these hollowed-out corpses are found only in the Amazon. However, a River Monsters viewer e-mailed me in a state of some consternation with the news that he had once seen the same flesh-eaters at an aquarist’s shop in Florida, being sold under the name of “blue whale catfish.” What’s more, I’ve since seen posts on aquarists’ forums about Cetopsid catfish being kept or for sale. Some of these might be the fish they call the whale candiru in the Amazon, a plump one-pounder that goes by the scientific name of Cetopsis coecutiens, which is anything but a cutie except, perhaps, to an ichthyologist.

  As for the bloodsucking and occasionally penis-invading candiru, we kept a lonely one in a tank for some days while filming in the Amazon in 2008, but I’ve not heard of any being kept as pets, even by the keenest aquarists. In fact, certain parts of the United States expressly prohibit people from keeping members of the Trichomycteridae family even though, as the FishBase website notes, “The incorporation of this species in fish-based house security systems has been suggested.”

  CHAPTER 8

  NILE PERCH

  In the tomb of Rahotet, a court dignitary, at Medum in Egypt, there is a fresco of two men carrying a large Nile perch hung from a paddle. The tomb probably dates from about 2650 B.C., or more than 4500 years ago. Above the drawing is a hieroglyphic inscription, which translated reads, “Capturing the Aha fish.”

  At Medinet Gurob, south of Memphis, there are cemeteries filled with Lates dating back to the XVIII Dynasty [about 1580 B.C.]. The fish was unquestionably an object of worship there in those days.

  Leander J. McCormick, in Game Fish of the World, 1949

  EVEN AFTER TWO HOURS, the fish was showing no sign of tiring. For the fisherman in the boat, however, who was burning in the tropical sun, it was another matter.

  “Please, please fish, come on,” he begged, as his companions poured water over his head and down his back. But every time he gained a few inches of line, his opponent would take it back again. The fish was about twenty feet down in three hundred feet of water, but it absolutely refused to come any closer than that.

  “Maybe there’s a crocodile hanging on to its tail,” joked Shaban, the boatman.

  After four hours, nothing had changed, except a few details: the boat had drifted further from land, the fisherman’s legs and back were more buckled and his expression more grim, and his companions were now silent. The scene was like a modern-day reenactment of Ernest Hemingway’s tale of endurance and defeat, The Old Man and the Sea, except this was not the sea. The fish on the end was not a giant marlin but rather a Nile perch (Lates niloticus), one of the biggest freshwater species in the world.

  After eight hours, the fish is still not in, and the sky is starting to get dark. The fish is now three miles from where it took the lure. Nobody wants to be out on the lake at night, and if this goes on much longer, they’ll never find their camp, tucked somewhere
down a rocky inlet on the eastern shore. Despite the fisherman’s protests, the others give him an ultimatum. The double line above the leader has shown a few times. If he can get the eighty-pound mono leader within reach, they’ll grab that and try to haul the fish in. If he can’t ... well, he doesn’t have any other choice.

  The rod takes on an even more extreme curve, and the swivel at the top of the leader inches clear of the surface. Hands grasp the thick leader and start to heave. There’s a collective holding of breath as everyone prays the line won’t suddenly fall slack. Is this the moment when The Big Question is finally answered?

  The biggest Nile perch to be accurately recorded from this water, Lake Nasser in Egypt, weighed 230 pounds and is the IGFA all-tackle world record. But another fish, caught in the mid-1990s by retired tea planter Gerald Eastmure, was even bigger. It measured six feet, two inches long with a fifty-nine-inch girth, and it was estimated at over 275 pounds. But they are said to grow even bigger, up to 440 or even 500 pounds.

  These captures from Lake Nasser are perhaps more remarkable for the fact that it is a new, manmade water. The construction of the Aswan High Dam above the Nile’s first cataract created it in the 1960s. As usual with dams, it has been a mixed blessing. The dam itself radiates a dense web of power lines, carrying electricity down the Nile valley, and the regular flooding of the lower river has been brought under control, although the sediments that used to fertilize the Nile delta are starting to fill in the lake. But tens of thousands of Nubians and the temple of Abu Simbel had to be moved to higher ground as more than two thousand square miles of desert were flooded. Meanwhile, as a vast new habitat for Nile perch, the lake has expanded the local fishing industry and lured anglers from around the world. They come because it is exotic yet accessible and because they’ll probably catch their lifetime-best freshwater fish: fifty pounds is a realistic target, and a lucky few catch one over one hundred pounds. And there’s the ever-present chance—maybe the next fish that hits the lure?—of something much bigger than that.

  Back in the boat, hands grab the leader and pull. The fish kicks, but after all this time, the men aren’t going to let it go, and they heave it onto the deck. For a moment, everyone is silent. Heads shake in disbelief as the fish is restrained on the unhooking mat. A hand reaches in with a pair of pliers and removes the lure from its mouth. Its deep flanks are almost luminous, its silver scales gathering and intensifying the fading light like a battery of miniature mirrors. On its back, the spiked dorsal fin stands proud. Nobody wants to say anything, but the scales confirm that this is not a collective hallucination. It weighs only seventy-five pounds. Why did it take so long to land?

  The only reason I believe this story is because I was in the boat. The date was May 1998, and I had gone to Lake Nasser to write a newspaper article. The fish took a trolled Depth Raider plug in a bay on the western shore at 12:40 p.m. To keep it away from the rocky shore, we started the outboard and held it clear, and from then on it kept deep. As we drifted over the sunken river channel, which runs down the middle of the lake, we could sometimes see it through the clear water. Although broken and distorted by the surface ripples, it looked big but not huge. One possible reason why the angler, Dave Everett, was making no impression was that the fish was foul-hooked, maybe in the back or tail. But the line appeared to be coming from its mouth, so the lack of leverage was a mystery. We could only conclude that the fish was deeper down than we thought and, therefore, a lot bigger.

  We got it in the boat at 9:35 p.m., after eight hours and fifty-five minutes. When we put it back in the water, cradled in the weighing sling, it wasted no time recovering; it gave a strong kick and was gone.

  Back at the camp, which Shaban miraculously found in the dark, the reaction was predictable. Had we been trying to set some ridiculously inappropriate light-tackle record, like the man who went after mako shark with a fly rod and a 12- or 18-pound tippet? (After he was smashed up several times, a hooked mako obligingly jumped into the boat, and the man is now the proud holder of a line-class record.) Dave was using 25-pound line, which should have beaten the fish comfortably in open water in fifteen minutes at most. (The record 230-pound fish was taken on 20-pound line.)

  There were also veiled suggestions that Dave must have been pussyfooting around and not using the full strength of his tackle. But Dave, a former weight lifter, was a wreck, his back muscles shot. And although I can’t vouch for the crushed gonads, which were cushioning the rod butt, both groins sported colorful bruises the next day. Perhaps to prove a point, he caught a fifty-pounder from the shore three days later, on the same line and with a lighter rod, this time exerting less pressure on the fish so as not to bring it in to the rocky shallows while it was still lively. It was ready to scoop out of the water after only twenty minutes.

  In the decade since then, I’ve tied my brain in knots trying to work out how this fish punched so far above its weight, and I think I might now have an answer. But I’ve also wondered what story might have been spawned if we’d never got it in.

  I also wanted to go back to try for a big one myself. On that trip I was an observer, first as a journalist and then as an emergency stand-in guide. The fishing is not unlike big-game fishing at sea, right down to the waves crashing over the bow, with lures being trolled behind the boats for several hours every day. But because trolling places are limited, usually to two rods per boat in order to avoid tangles, these places were limited to paying clients.

  But I did pick up a rod a few times to explore the rocky margins, a style of fishing that is more to my taste. I find big waters intimidating, boring even, but the Lake Nasser shoreline is 4,500 miles of cliffs plunging straight down, precarious points, shallow coves, and views through clear water of an epic underwater geography. Sometimes you can also see fish right in close, although a looming biped will make them vanish. One day I cast to two moving shadows from a narrow ledge at the top of a sheer cliff, but a third fish that came from nowhere seized my lure. After running straight down the underwater cliff face, the fish then started moving along the bank, with the line scraping on unseen rocks as it did so and with me following on the steep, crumbling mountainside above. When I finally brought it to the surface, my guide Mohammed had to clamber twenty feet down and balance on a small rock in order to secure its lower jaw. As he called up, “About fifty pounds,” two other Nile perch materialized, just feet away from him, and calmly observed proceedings before melting away. After being held steady for a moment, my fish launched itself away from the mountainside, gliding high above the sunken desert floor.

  I finally got my chance for another crack at this species when we filmed the second series of River Monsters. But in the ten years I’d been away, catches at Lake Nasser had tailed off. Commercial fishing could be part of the reason, and it’s also possible that the water’s productivity has declined after the initial input of nutrients from the flooded land. But a major factor seems to be fish intelligence. Catch and release means that fish learn: a straightforward association between a particular thing in the water and a bad experience. Even when I was there, the perch were starting to reject large, gaudy lures in favor of smaller, more lifelike patterns. Now soft artificials and hard-to-catch livebaits are the order of the day, but even these don’t fool the bigger fish.

  So we started to look for places that are less accessible. All over the world, fish populations are under attack thanks to the human population’s increasing need for food. And with fewer fish, there are fewer big fish. Therefore, for most species we’ll never know if the old stories about monsters are true. So the fisherman’s El Dorado is a place where you step back in time, where people have kept away. Mere remoteness is not enough of a deterrent. In the Amazon, for example, fishermen will drag canoes through miles of forest for the chance to make a lucrative catch. There needs to be something else protecting the fish.

  The range of the Nile perch extends to the Senegal and Niger rivers in West Africa and also to the Congo. But its real heart
land is the African Rift Valley, where it is known as the mbuta or netch-assa. The Rift Valley is a two thousand–mile-long rip in the earth’s crust, where a sliver of East Africa is in the process of pulling apart from the rest of the continent. Eventually the sea will flood this sunken trench, but even now the rift can be seen from space because of the water it already contains. The largest Rift Valley lake is the ribbon-shaped Lake Tanganyika. At nine-tenths of a mile deep (4,800 feet), it is the second deepest lake in the world, after the mile-deep Lake Baikal in Siberia (5,387 feet). But I was more interested in two lakes at the southern end of Ethiopia: Chamo and Abaya. These are said to contain the largest Nile crocodiles in Africa, which, in theory, ought to be keeping the fishermen away.

  But before unpacking my rods, I called at the National Museum in Addis Ababa to check out some of the earliest known fishing tackle. The Rift Valley is well known as the home of the earliest human ancestors—Lucy, Ardi, and other so-called missing links—so it was also, most probably, home to the world’s first fishermen. I tried to imagine exactly what that meant: the realization not only that water was a potential source of food but also that it contained hidden dangers. I also thought about how this tested and fueled early human ingenuity. Did they first collect fish with their hands from drying out ponds and streams, as I have done from the Luangwa River in Zambia? Did they then progress to making traps, or were spears the next step? The items I was looking at—but wasn’t allowed to touch—were fragments of dark bone eight thousand years old with pointed ends and notched edges, and they came from the same site where a three-foot-long skull from an early Nile perch was unearthed. There was also a precursor of the fish hook: a double-ended spike measuring three inches long. I’ve seen exactly the same thing in the Amazon but made of wood. With a cord tied to a notch around its middle, it is threaded inside the body of a small fish. When this is then swallowed by a bigger fish, the spike turns sideways and impales the predator’s throat.