River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Giant snakeheads can exceed four feet and forty pounds, which is certainly big enough to do some damage. To be convinced, though, I needed more than secondhand stories. So when a man named Sombat showed me his scar, it was a major breakthrough. Three years before, he had dived underneath his floating house to fix one of the bundles of bamboo on which it floated. As he was working, he saw a snakehead approaching with its pectoral fins flared—like an elephant spreading its ears as a last warning before a charge. The next thing he knew, it was savaging his leg, and he scrambled out of the water. At the hospital, staff refused to believe that the tooth marks, the size of a dog bite, were those of a fish. After stitching him up, they gave him a rabies shot.

  Sombat had been minding his own business, but most attacks are not motiveless. There’s a big industry on these lakes based on collecting snakehead fry and then growing them in pens for later sale. When giant snakeheads are young, they form dense shoals, just a few feet across, which the fishermen net, having located them from the dimpling they make on the surface when they come up to breathe. As air-breathers, they can then be kept at very high density—unlike other fish, which would die in such conditions. This would be about the easiest fishing anywhere but for one thing. You first have to deal with the parents.

  Everyone said the most experienced fisherman on Khao Laem was a man named Khun Dar. I went to his floating house and found a slight, soft-spoken man who filled me in on the finer points of hunting pla chado. He told me that when you approach a fry ball underwater, you do not need to look for the parents; they will find you. Generally the male corrals the young while the female patrols the perimeter. These observations, I realized, are actually more detailed than any that scientists have made because his livelihood—and his life—depend on them. He confirmed that snakeheads have a threat posture, facing you head-on with fins flared, but you mustn’t shoot at this time because this is a small, hard-boned target. You must wait until the fish turns side-on and then spear it in the flank.

  If you get it wrong, the worst-case scenario can be very bad indeed. A Burmese man who had crossed into Thailand to fish failed to return to the surface after diving toward a fry ball. His wife, waiting in the boat, dove in search of him and found his body. He had speared the fish in the head, but it had continued its charge and, in so doing, thrust the back end of the man’s metal spear through his mask and into his face. Then, according to fisherman Khun Lang, who told me this, the fish’s continued struggles forced the spear out the back of the man’s skull.

  Although this was a freak incident, the aggression of giant snakeheads is very real. Back in Florida, at Palm Beach Atlantic University, ichthyologist Ray Waldner had told me about the extreme nature of snakeheads’ parental care, and this is the reason he still fears for Florida’s native species: because snakeheads could in time outreproduce them. In the breeding season in Southeast Asia, rod-and-line fishing mostly seeks to provoke this aggression, not any desire to feed. Khao Laem, most of which is a national park, is a maze of bays, inlets, and backwaters that are surrounded by misty pinnacles of forested rock, and the rod fishing, just like spear fishing at this time, is all about finding the fry balls. If there’s a wind-chop on the water, these can be almost invisible. You find yourself looking at a certain place but don’t quite know why. Then you think you see an orange tinge in the water, the color of the very young fry before they grow beyond two or three inches. At this point, you need to paddle into casting range and be ready for the next dimpling, which should be near the last place you saw them if you’ve managed not to scare them off. Then you cast a noisy surface lure beyond the fry ball and bring it back right through the middle of them....

  In theory, this provokes a savage strike from one of the parents, but on Khao Laem, the snakeheads know all about fishing lures, so mine were ignored. My only hit was from a ten-inch fry, at this size more subdued in appearance, with a black stripe down its side. I wondered if this shoal had perhaps been orphaned, but then a larger rise disproved this notion.

  Frustrated by my lack of success, I switched to casting blind, systematically exploring likely looking spots along the shoreline. Halfway into one inlet, I saw an abandoned floating hut. Remembering Sombat’s story, I sent a cast toward it, and it dropped a fluky six inches short. Scarcely had I started the retrieve when a fish smashed into it and then crash-dove into weed. Paddling closer, I managed to disentangle it, and minutes later I was admiring a small (three-pound) giant snakehead. Things were looking up. But when I returned to the floating hut that was our daytime base, the person acting as our film monitor explained that we hadn’t in fact received permission to fish yet, so I’d have to stop for now. For the whole of the next day we sat in the rain, waiting for a permission that never came. This inaction went on and on until we realized we would have to abandon fishing altogether.

  Fortunately this wasn’t the complete disaster it could have been. Pulling in a giant snakehead on a line from the safety of a boat might have been a risk to my fingers, but for our director Steve Gooder, this had always seemed like the soft option. Steve wanted me to swim into a fry ball, with Khun Dar as my bodyguard, in order to witness real snakehead aggression at first hand. On top of that, he wanted me to carry a minicamera, as this could be the first-ever footage of its kind. This was an exciting idea, but it also made me uneasy. Observing fierce fish underwater is one thing; provoking them with your presence is another. But I agreed that doing this would give the film an extra dimension, and it was the only way we could test the likely truth of the stories we’d heard. We duly located a fry ball, which seemed to be resident in one particular bay, secured Dar’s cooperation, and planned to roll into action the next morning.

  That evening, however, our film monitor announced that she was returning to Bangkok. We could do no more filming here. Not being able to fish was one thing, but without this scene, we had no film. We would have to come back—God knows when—for an expensive reshoot, possibly having to hire the fishing guide that our film monitor kept recommending. But Steve refused to be defeated. We’d go to Sri Nakharin, which is not a national park, and do it there. Without hesitation, Dar, barefoot in shorts and T-shirt and carrying only his mask and spear, agreed to come with us. But I thought we were wasting our time, and on arrival at Sri Nakharin, my opinion appeared to be vindicated. Unlike Khao Laem, this lake has very little shelter, and a strong breeze had whipped up big waves. This meant that finding a fry ball would be impossible. On top of that, the weather had stirred up the water. Instead of several yards’ visibility, we had barely a few feet. Even if we found any fish, going after them could be crazily dangerous.

  Teaming up with some local fishermen, we divided into two boats and started quartering the water. Against all expectations, in the afternoon the other boat located a fry ball and called us over. Beaching our boat, we walked along the shore, scouring the surface. Then Dar pointed. At first I couldn’t see it, but then I did: a small patch where the surface texture was momentarily different. I would have to go through with this after all.

  While the film kit was prepared, I lay on my back and did some breath holds. Dar dives most days, so I was unsure of my ability to stay down with him. To make things worse, my rising apprehension was raising my heart rate and increasing my oxygen consumption. I tried to control this by calming my mind, sending my thoughts away to a quiet place. I wanted to do this thing but also I didn’t. Ideally, I wanted to be sitting in comfort watching back the footage from the snakehead’s territory, having fast-forwarded the process of going to get it or, better still, having skipped it altogether. Actually that wasn’t true. This was not unlike the topsy-turvy feeling I used to get when lacing up my alloystudded boots before eighty minutes of exhaustion and pain on the rugby field when I was a teenager: a mixture of fear and something else that catalyzed that fear into a kind of psychic food. And somewhere in here surely is an explanation for the universal human need for an adversary, whether human or abstract. If the pulse never quickens fo
r anything, then there’s little point it beating at all.

  It was time to go. Dar was on the bow of the small boat, and I boarded behind him. He signaled to the man paddling—forward, this way, stop—and then slipped into the water. But as I prepared to follow suit, he submerged and was gone. I belly-flopped after him and kicked with my fins, but the murky water had swallowed him up. Pushing through a forest of weed stems, the camera cable dragging behind me, I could barely see beyond my outstretched arm and no longer knew which way to go. I started to have visions of a five-foot metal rod flashing out of the gloom. It was time to come up.

  But I hadn’t missed the shot because Dar hadn’t made contact. We found the fry ball again, some way off now, and went down a second time. But again I lost Dar, and again Dar failed to find the fish. The next time, I resolved not to lose him and stuck so close that his feet were kicking my mask. Suddenly he stopped and I drew alongside, and I saw him looking around with his neck arched and eyes wide. Then I saw a movement, diagonally toward me, of black-and-white striped shapes. And when I looked back toward Dar, just a heartbeat later, I saw no discernible figure but instead a confusion of movement rising in the water. Instinctively I knew and kicked for the surface, where I saw him arrive moments later, not holding the spear itself but rather the grip in the middle of its thick rubber strips—the sign that it had been fired.

  The spear’s breakaway point, secured by two feet of cord, had passed through the snakehead’s back muscle, just underneath the long dorsal fin. A flesh wound only, from which this tough customer would easily recover. Having been forced to confront the fish in this way, I was overwhelmed by this improbable twist: that both fisherman and fish would survive. Held in the water after being freed from the cord, it rested quietly in my hands and tilted up to sip some air. As it started to flex, I took one last look at its broad black-and-white flanks, abstract patterned like the map of some secret land. The eyes, like black marbles, told me nothing, as it flicked its tail and melted back into the water.

  CHAPTER 14

  RIVER SHARK REVISITED

  Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked.

  He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought.

  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 1952

  IN JANUARY 2009 a small team of scientists in South Africa made a discovery that sent such shockwaves through the scientific community and beyond that those waves rebounded on the team’s leader in the form of anonymous threats.

  What they had found was the largest bull shark ever recorded anywhere in the world: over thirteen feet in total length (four meters exactly) and weighing an estimated one thousand pounds. But its immense size was not the only thing that caused such waves. What intrigued other biologists was that it was in an area where they had never before recorded the species: two hundred miles south of its normal range, in water thought to be too cold for the species to survive.

  But what caused the wider stir was something else. This water is also populated by jet skiers, kite-surfers, and holidaying bathers, and it is flanked by luxury homes and condominiums. In the popular imagination, this earthly paradise should have been free from such hellish beasts for one fundamental reason: it is up a river.

  For some biologists and fishermen, the bull shark’s ability to swim up rivers—way beyond any estuarine saltiness and into pure fresh water—is well known. And this is something that no amount of handwringing about real estate values or wanting to shoot the messenger can do anything about. But the reason why a bull shark was in the Breede River was a mystery. Was it a freak occurrence or did it have company? And why was it so astoundingly huge? To try to get answers, the team returned to the river the following year. Their interest was not only academic. Although most sharks are harmless to humans, bull sharks are one of the few species, alongside tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) and great whites (Carcharodon carcharias), that are confirmed man-eaters. In other words, was this a human tragedy waiting to happen?

  In the hope of shedding light on this dark subject, they had brought three acoustic tags and a hydrophone. Each tag would enable them to track a shark until the tag’s miniature battery ran out after about three months. But first they had to catch a shark. This was where I came in. With my experience of catching large fish from rivers and, more specifically, river bull sharks in Australia, I was ideally qualified to join the investigation.

  From Cape Town, the film crew and I drove four hours east along the coast through parched empty countryside to the sleepy town of Witsand at the river mouth. White-painted houses gleamed against a cobalt sky like a picture-postcard. A bar of windswept sand reached across the river mouth, leaving only a narrow gap on the far side where the river joined the Indian Ocean. This setting couldn’t have been more different from the jungles and mountains that are my normal fishing grounds. And seeing the fishermen wading up to their waists to collect prawns and cast flies, I realized that this investigation was different too. My fishing success or failure could make the difference between life and death.

  In some sport-fishing circles, a shark is “caught” once you’ve touched the wire leader, which you then cut as close to the shark as possible, trusting that in time the hook will rust out, especially if it’s not stainless. Similarly, if you want to attach a thin plastic “spaghetti tag” with serial and phone numbers, you’d normally do this remotely, using a long stick. But fixing an acoustic tag is more hands-on: we would need to restrain the shark in the shallows or on the bank while we also took accurate measurements, samples of any parasites, and a small fin clipping for DNA analysis.

  The fish caught in 2009, by South African Angler Hennie Papenfuss after three fishless days, was a heavily pregnant female. Although some shark species lay their eggs in a protective case—the so-called “mermaid’s purse”—most retain them in the body. Bull sharks take the process one stage further, with the yolk sac turning into a type of placenta that is embedded in the uterus and supplies the embryo with nutrients from the mother. It’s remarkably similar to the mechanism in mammals, and was first observed in sharks by Aristotle, in the fourth century BC. Coming into the world at between twenty and thirty inches long, bull shark pups have a significant head start on most other fish.

  After tagging and releasing the big female, the scientists took to the tracking boat, lowered the hydrophone into the water, and rotated it until it they picked up the “ping” from the tag. The plan now was to follow it, day and night, in continuous shifts for two weeks. But four hours later it was still lying in the same place. The team’s leader, Meaghen McCord, began to worry that the fish might not have recovered from its long struggle on the line. If this was the case, they’d remain in the dark about what this shark had been doing here, although for some people living beside the river, its death would have been good news.

  Then, suddenly, it was no longer there. The tracking boat swept up and down the river, dipping and rotating the hydrophone every five hundred yards, but all they heard was crackling static. Finally, they picked up a signal in the surf zone, outside the river mouth. Maybe the carcass had been washed out here? But the signal’s source was moving. Maybe its recent experience had told it that the river was not a good place to be, or maybe the moving water here was just a good place to get reoxygenated.

  What happened next surprised everybody. The shark reentered the river, and when the team had to pack up fifteen days later, it was still there. During this time it was found to patrol a beat some fifteen miles long, up and down on each tide, twice daily—a total distance of fifty to sixty miles a day. The furthest upstream it traveled was twenty miles from the sea, which is beyond the influence of the tide, and where there is no trace of salt in the water.

  The scientists’ hypothesis, based on its continued presence, was that it was in the river to pup. Compared with the sea, rivers contain fewer predators that could prey on the young. For a start, there are no other sharks and possibly no male bull sharks, which won’t hesitate to eat
their own kind. But set against that, a small bull shark isn’t as comfortable physiologically in fresh water as a big one. It has a higher surfacearea-to-volume ratio, so it has to expend much more energy expelling water from its tissues. Giving birth to their young in a river would only make sense if the pros exceeded the cons.

  To find out more, we needed another shark. I had come well equipped with my own big bull shark gear, which was based on what I had previously borrowed from Terry Hessey in Australia, for shore fishing in the Brisbane River mouth. This comprised a custom-built 5½-foot shark rod, an 80-pound-class reel holding nearly half a mile of 80-pound mono, and PVC-coated wire rope in strengths up to 1,300 pounds. But the information I now got hold of meant that I could have left all this at home.

  Witsand used to be a big port for commercial fishing vessels, but nowadays only a handful of boats are left. Eugene Beukes skippers one of these, and he told me that occasional Zambezi sharks, as bull sharks are known in Africa, have been turning up here for decades. To prove that this was no fisherman’s tale, he showed me a brown-and-white photograph of his father with a 532-pound female caught in 1963. In those days the commercial boats used to fish in the river for dusky kob, a fish the color of old pewter that can grow to over 100 pounds. Once in a while, when a fisherman was pulling in his line, suddenly there would be less weight on the end and in would come just the kob’s head, cleanly cut behind the gills. If this kept happening, it made a serious dent in the fisherman’s income, so one year, after bringing in sixteen kob heads, Eugene’s father baited a wire trace on a handline. He landed the shark after a one-hour battle and didn’t boat any more incomplete kob that year.

  Cobus Wiid, a sun-tanned wiry man in his early sixties who grew up here, told me something similar. “The people of Witsand always refer to the shark,” he said. He remembers another fisherman, his neighbor Johan Engela, who caught a 352-pounder in the mid-1980s after having several fish removed from his line. “There were no more incidents after this shark was killed,” he said, referring to the time the plastic bait container hanging off the back of his boat was grabbed that same year.