River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Above the drone of the mosquitoes, which continued to fly despite the breeze coming off the water, Terry told me how he’d nearly not landed his big shark. The line had gotten snagged on the drop-off that runs parallel to the bank, and he had to wade out in the dark to free it. After hearing this, I was almost relieved when dawn arrived with the reels still silent. Terry and Ben had to go to work, and they weren’t sure when they could manage another session. Getting good, fresh bait was also going to be a problem, as was coinciding with an incoming tide. So in the meantime I decided to follow the river upstream, past the highrises of downtown and the southwestern suburbs to Kookaburra Park, some fifty miles away as the shark swims. Here I trundled into a small car park and walked a short distance over grass to a steep bank. I baited with dead sprat and didn’t have long to wait before something snatched at the line. But nothing else happened, and I eventually retrieved to find a bare hook. This happened a few times before I finally connected, only to find that the culprit was a foot-long catfish. My next trip was the same story. Then some local anglers told me the secret: live mullet at night. They also said some people eat the small sharks from here because they’re tastier than sharks from the sea. This squares with the lower urea levels of sharks in fresh water (which in a dead shark is broken down by bacteria to form ammonia), so I judged their tip to be reliable.

  Getting the mullet was a mission in itself. First, I had to master the art of throw-net fishing, a method I’d steered clear of until now. I’d had a couple of lessons from Amazon fishermen, who hold part of the lead-weighted margin in their teeth and release this by opening their mouth at the correct moment. It’s all about timing, said my toothless instructors. But the Australian method, I was pleased to discover, doesn’t involve teeth, although otherwise it’s very similar, particularly the novice’s tendency to land the net in a tightly knotted clump. Eventually I got the hang of it and found a place where I could catch bait, returning, then, with greater anticipation.

  The water here is still tidal, rising and falling a good few feet. I arrived at dusk, some hours before high tide, which I’d heard is when there’s the greatest chance. But rather than wait, I lip-hooked a small mullet and swung it out on a running lead. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t expecting anything to happen and wasn’t mentally in hunting mode that the spool was suddenly whining. I picked up the rod and tightened the line—not a sweeping strike, as I was using a circle hook—and immediately knew this was a shark. Its reaction on the line was different from any fish I’d caught before: dashing in all directions seemingly at once, including straight toward me, when I struggled to maintain contact. I took some time to get the initiative; then it was a case of judging when to grab it. If I left it too long, it would have a hard time recovering; if I tried too soon, it might still be too much of a handful. I was using a short, one hundred–pound wire leader and eighty-pound braided line, which was amply strong enough to ease the shark onto the shelving mud, where I grabbed it behind the head with one hand and then ran with it up to the grass. I could feel its body tense and flex—a different feel from other fish, possibly because of its different anatomy: the more flexible skeleton made from cartilage not bone and the muscles attaching to the inside of the thick skin, which forms a kind of exoskeleton. It was about ten pounds and thirty inches long. I couldn’t look at it for too long, but even though I had it in my hands, it still seemed so incongruous: a shark from a river, about the width of the Thames at Henley, and not that different looking either.

  But how much further up did they go? I’d heard a story about a thousand-pound racehorse that had been attacked in the water another thirty miles upstream, and I was curious to know the details. The horse’s trainer, Alan Treadwell, witnessed the incident while he was swimming the horse back and forth across the river as part of its training program. Alan had bought the horse, Glen Burns Arm, at a bargain price because of an injury that had supposedly finished the horse’s career. But Alan’s novel training methods had given it a new lease on life, and it had started winning again. On this day, March 23, 2005, Alan as usual attached a half-inch rope to the horse’s halter and then kept abreast of it as it swam by walking along the footway of the road bridge above. The horse was nearly halfway across when, for no apparent reason, it started to flail and sink. “The horse looks like it’s going to drown,” said Alan. “All of a sudden I saw something hanging off the back of him. As the horse rolled over, the color lightened, and it went to white underneath, whatever it was.”

  Alan ran to the shore and, together with his stable hand, heaved the horse out of the eleven-foot-deep hole below the bridge. “If we hadn’t got him out, I don’t think he would have survived,” he said.

  From the vet’s photographs, I saw that Glen Burns Arm had a single crescent-shaped cut on his right flank, with five or six broad tooth marks visible, together with parallel scratches about an inch apart, as if made by teeth that had skidded across the flat hide and failed to penetrate. When I showed the picture to Vic Peddemors, who heads shark research for the New South Wales state government, he declared it was definitely a shark bite. From the orientation of the wound, which ran vertically not horizontally, it appeared that the shark must have turned partially on its side when it attacked, and just the broad-based serrated teeth of the upper jaw, rather than both sets, had penetrated.

  From the gentle curvature of the wound, Vic deduced the front teeth of quite a large shark inflicted it, but the shark had been unable to take a bigger mouthful because of the horse’s bulk. This tallies perfectly with what we know about bull shark physiology: that larger ones cope more easily in fresh water than small ones. And this was totally fresh water, as I had verified with a salinity meter. But Vic was then visibly shocked when he compared the tooth spacing with a bull shark jaw in his collection and found an almost perfect match. His reference jaws came from a shark nine feet long.

  The case seemed open-and-shut, apart from one thing. Five miles down from this bridge is Mount Crosby weir, a twelve-foot step in the river’s water level and a barrier that would block the way upstream to any fish. Maybe something else was responsible, something that can circumvent weirs. The only other large aquatic predator in Australian waters is the saltwater crocodile. However, the official limit of the saltie’s range is some three hundred miles north, although isolated individuals have been reported well south of this in the past. But then again, crocodiles have to breathe air and haul out of the water to warm their bodies, so you’d expect to hear of other sightings.

  Things didn’t add up. But then came a piece of information that solved the puzzle. Over the years the Brisbane River has occasionally burst its banks. The biggest recent flood before 2011 was in 1974, when archive photos show the water below Mount Crosby weir at the same level as it is above. Information about shark lifespan is incomplete, but the FishBase website quotes thirty-two years for bull sharks. So it’s conceivable that a juvenile swam upstream in the floods and has been there ever since—and very likely not just one.

  You can’t help wondering what might have happened to a human, a fraction of a horse’s size, if they’d gone swimming there that day. This isn’t just idle speculation. This place is a popular swimming hole, right next to the road with a convenient parking lot, deep water next to a clean bank, and a bridge from which the more adventurous can jump. And when I was there in early 2009, four years after the attack, there was a total absence of any warning notices.

  Sharks are an emotive subject. Unlike most of the other predators in this book, they claim victims from the developed world, people with verifiable names, grieving families, and backgrounds similar to our own. When this program aired, it was one of the few that prompted negative comment. I received a couple of e-mails accusing me of demonizing sharks. Why draw attention to these attacks? Sharks get bad enough press anyway, they said. A couple of others asked why I returned the sharks I caught to the river if they might potentially attack people. Surely this was irresponsible. Both these views mis
s the point.

  Yes, the stereotypical image of sharks is indeed incorrect. They are not the ruthless exterminators of popular imagination—but neither are they benign and cuddly. Some sharks do attack and kill people. Ignoring this fact won’t make it go away. In fact, ignoring it will help to ensure that it continues to happen, which will help to keep alive the ignorant antishark mentality that these would-be conservationists claim to be fighting. People are right to be afraid of sharks. What’s important is what they do with this fear, which brings us to the second objection.

  Killing what you are afraid of is not the answer. In fact, as my next bull shark encounter would make very clear, trying to do so may even make matters worse. No, the answer lies in understanding the predator—not in some wishy-washy, metaphorical head-patting sense, but instead in terms of its biology, why it does what it does. Then we can adapt our behavior accordingly. In the case of bull sharks, not everybody knows that they can come into fresh water. For most of us this is academic, but for those living in the risk areas, this could be a matter of life and death. If bull sharks are present in significant numbers, then humans should not get in the water, particularly between dusk and dawn when bull sharks tend to be most active. Another wise precaution, in the bull shark’s range, is not to swim in river mouths, especially after rain, which flushes extra food into the water.

  It’s a question of being informed and taking basic precautions. Shark “attacks” are actually very rare—some seventy to one hundred worldwide each year, of which about ten are fatal. In fact, they mostly make the news because they are unexpected. Just before we returned home from this shoot, a navy diver lost a hand and a leg to a nine-foot bull shark in Sydney harbor.

  Meanwhile, back at Luggage Point for a few more night sessions, my baits stayed untouched. Or rather, sharks didn’t touch them. I did hook something, though, in a part of the river that had recently been dredged. But the back-breaking weight felt strangely inert. Terry and Ben ran down the mud beach with flashlights to see what was on the line, and their reaction, on the filmed recording of the event, was a series of electronic bleeps. With its cavernous, diver-swallowing mouth (so they say) and crest of nail-like spines down its back, it needed all three of us to lift it—and even more of an effort to take it in mentally. It was a six-foot giant grouper (Epinephelus lanceolatus), or as they call it here, a Queensland groper, normally an inhabitant of reefs and the last thing anyone would expect to find here.

  In some ways I was disappointed that it wasn’t a shark, but then it occurred to me that this fish, with its angry stare and mosaic flanks, was, in its own way, an answer: a graphic embodiment of the unexpected. But nowhere near as unexpected as the behavior of the next bull sharks I encountered.

  CHAPTER 11

  RIVER STINGRAY

  The tail is whipped forwards in a curve with the sting pointing to the area of body contact. The sting easily penetrates rubber boots and is powerful enough to be driven into wood.

  Michael Goulding, Amazon: The Flooded Forest, 1989

  THE DATE IS AUGUST 1993, and we are at Lago Grande again, the remote lake near José’s hut in the floodplain of the Rio Purus. I’ve beached my wooden canoe on the central island, in one of the few places where getting out on the shore is possible; everywhere else is either knee-deep mud or jungle right down to the water. But my relief at being able to get the circulation back into my buttocks is short lived. Although this is the dry season, with the water level near the bottom of its annual forty- to fifty-foot flood cycle, a storm has swept in and is blasting the lake’s surface.

  I have two lines out, each baited with a dead piranha, half-pound red-bellies, lying on the bottom. The lines twitch and shudder from the impact of the raindrops, as distinct from the sharp continuous jumping followed by stillness that signals the attentions of other piranhas, so I resist the urge to check the baits. I picture them down there in the gloom: luminous silvery shapes reflecting the weak light from their small scales.

  I saw an arapaima breach here yesterday, and for once I have halfdecent baits, rather than bare hooks, well placed to intercept it. I try to ignore my rain-soaked clothes and the chill that is starting to seep into my body, instead entering that mental state outside normal time in which everything contracts to one endless still moment. The rain on the water is like the roar of radio static, and plump droplets slide down the line, which, I now notice, is slowly spooling off the reel.

  I pick up the rod and tighten into something heavy, which responds by wrenching the rod and ripping line from the reel. At length it slows and stops, becoming immobile. Just as I’m wondering if it’s snagged, it runs again, parallel to the bank. The sidestrain I’m applying doesn’t seem to affect its course, and its movement is strangely smooth. This doesn’t feel like a fish at all: there’s no sense of a tail beating—just long glides interspersed by immobility. Gradually I shorten the line, whose angle now tells me the creature is coming up. I feel a repeated jarring, then there’s a boil on the surface—not a swirl but a compact eruption. Then a repulsive warty limb emerges into the air, flailing from side to side behind a wall of spray. Halfway along its tapering brown length my eyes fix on the blurred shape of a four-inch blade: stingray.

  The stingray is an animal that, until now, I’ve known only by reputation. But I know enough to be aware that they’re potentially lethal. This notoriety goes way back to the story of Odysseus, who was killed by a spear tipped with a stingray spine, thus fulfilling the prophecy that his death would come “from the sea.”

  I’m momentarily transfixed, torn between curiosity and fear. I can pull it up the gently sloping mud bank, but then what? Already thought is lagging behind events, as the blotchy brown mass slides up wet mud toward me, its amorphous margins flowing into the craters left by retreating feet. In the center of the yard-wide disc is a raised turret where two eyes open and close, flashing black. And it’s bellowing. A loud rhythmic sound that is at first inexplicable until I realize that those blinking eyes are its spiracles, now sucking in air instead of water, which it is pumping out via the gill slits on its underside. And all the while it brandishes that blade, stabbing the air like a scorpion. I reach behind me for my machete and cut through the tail at its root. Then I hack into the region that I take to be its head. The flesh is jellylike on a frame of gristle. Already I feel sick and ashamed at what I have done: the instinctive, unthinking response to fear—and a frightening reminder of what lurks inside all of us when we feel threatened. Next—so predictable—come the excuses. I remind myself that I’m fishing, some of the time, for food. And that, unavoidably, means killing my catch. But that wasn’t why I killed this fish. Then, something fluttering in the water catches my attention. It’s a saucer-sized miniature of the beached mother, a translucent baby stingray still with its yolk sac. There are three others the same size, one of which is stranded on the mud. I lift it into the water with the flat of the machete, but doubt any of them will survive, having been expelled before full term.

  When I present the fish to José back at his hut, he snorts in disgust. “Arraia! I don’t even feed those things to the dogs!”

  The normal response to a ray on the line, it turns out, is the same as mine. If its sting hits you, locals told me, you won’t walk for a month. If you can’t get to a hospital, folk wisdom decrees you should get somebody to urinate on your leg. For the remedy to work best, it’s apparently best administered by a member of the opposite sex, ideally a virgin, although locals cheerfully admit this is even less likely than finding a fully kitted A&E department around the next river bend. All in all, these alien invaders from the sea are more feared than piranhas, and I didn’t see anybody ever go near a live one, apart from one fisherman who gently disentangled a ten-pounder from his net and let it fall, alive and unharmed, back into the water. I took to avoiding them by not fishing bottom baits in areas where I knew they were. Those I did catch I flipped onto their backs and then unhooked with a stick. And I learned that if you do have to wade, you
do the stingray shuffle: sliding your feet forward rather than lifting them and planting them down. Rays don’t like being stepped on, even if it’s accidental, and will respond to this as if under attack.

  But what are they doing here so far from any ocean? Like some shark species, especially bull sharks, some rays have the ability to reduce the concentration of solutes in their bodies, which allows them to swim into fresh water—albeit at the cost of having to pee twenty times as much as they do in the ocean. But these Amazon rays didn’t swim here from the Atlantic. Their closest marine relatives are in the Pacific. This only makes sense in the context of the continent’s geological history. Originally the Amazon flowed west to the Pacific until the rising of the Andes blocked its exit, thus creating a vast area of lake and swamp. A couple of million years later, the water breached the highlands in the east and the basin drained into the Atlantic, thereby creating the river mouth that exists today. By this time the rays, trapped in fresh water, had lost the ability to vary their tissue fluid concentration. So if you put an Amazon stingray in the sea, it would die. They have become true freshwater fish.

  And the rivers and lakes are full of them. They are particularly abundant in shallow water—river beaches and the bays and margins of lakes—where they are the largest predatory fish. There’s one muddy bay in Lago Grande where I wouldn’t wade for any amount of money. But the spine is purely for defense; it is not used to attack prey. One evening, when fishing from a canoe, I spotted something moving in the extreme margin in mere inches of water. For several minutes, in the gloom, I couldn’t work out what it was. It was a glistening hump, moving with smooth stealth and occasionally appearing to pounce. Peering more closely, I thought I could see black eyes, and I realized this was a stingray hunting small fish. Another time, I observed one in a small stream, throwing itself like a blanket over something too small for me to see and then wriggling its body forward to manipulate the prey into its mouth to be crushed by its multiple rows of small teeth like flexible, uneven paving. This ability to hunt the extreme shallows, which are off-limits to other predatory fish, is clearly key to their success, along with the fact that they are the only sizeable fish that fishermen leave alone. They commonly hunt at night, and often in very cloudy water, which raises the question of how they detect prey, considering that their small eyes sit in the middle of the body on the opposite surface from the mouth. Like their marine cousins, they have scattered ampullae of Lorenzini to detect the electrical aura of small creatures buried in the bottom mud, but with fresh water being a poor conductor, these have very limited sensitivity. Certainly smell plays a part, as a bait of dead fish will too often attract a ray, and doubtless vibration too. At any rate, the desensitizing of their electrical sense hasn’t proved to be an undue handicap.