River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  The next morning a search party turned up with boats. They fired up their outboards and circled the area, and by the end of the day the wash from their propellers had dislodged two corpses. They found the final body the next day. One of the boatmen was Hermes Alves da Silva. He told me that all three men had clenched fists, gripping handfuls of weed, a detail that Reginaldo also mentioned. The bodies also had patches of black discoloration. “A bit like burn marks, but without the skin being broken,” said Hermes.

  Normally we expect monsters in deep water; in the shallows we feel safe. In the Amazon, there are two large predators that ambush prey in shallow water. Black caimans can sometimes be seen at periscope depth, with the gnarled head appearing like a piece of waterlogged driftwood. The rest of the time they lurk like submarines, the nictitating membranes over their eyes acting like goggles as they look up into the air, ready to launch themselves at a dog on the edge of a floating house or, perhaps, something more substantial. Anacondas are likewise masters of invisibility, remaining submerged for long periods or just breaking the surface film with their nostrils in the midst of some bank-side weeds, as they wait for hours for the thirsty animal that will feed them for the next few weeks.

  But neither of these was responsible for the cowboys’ deaths. The victims of caimans and anacondas are normally never found unless the predator is disturbed. In that case the killer will have left a clear signature. The teeth of a big caiman make deep punctures, and an anaconda’s needlelike teeth cut two crescent-shaped wounds. In the case of an anaconda, there might also be signs of partial digestion, as this predator sometimes regurgitates its prey, and possibly broken bones too, inflicted during the slow, crushing suffocation. These bodies had no such marks.

  This left one possible perpetrator. Unlike other monsters, it has insignificant teeth and very little muscle. But the poraquê is greatly feared because it has invisible powers. The poraquê is otherwise known as the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus), a creature with a unique aura in the Amazon and in the wider consciousness because of its ability to kill at a distance. At least with a goliath tigerfish or bull shark you can see what you’re dealing with, and if you don’t come into direct contact with it, you’re safe—but not this animal. Teeth are easy to understand but an animal that generates electricity is beyond the power of most of us to comprehend. We’re all told by anxious parents not to take hair-dryers or other mains-powered appliances anywhere near the bathtub because the combination of electricity and water is lethal, but here’s a power source that lives in water, in open defiance of the laws of physics—it’s a sci-fi fantasy made flesh. Thus, the fear of poraquê is the fear of the supernatural.

  There are actually hundreds of fish species that make use of electricity in some way, over and above the transmission of nerve impulses. Sharks and rays detect weak electrical fields in the water, and these lead them to prey. Others, such as knifefish (so named because of their bladelike bodies, which taper to a pointed tail) generate their own electricity, creating a field around them that becomes distorted by external objects. By reading these perturbations with electro-receptor organs, these fish can navigate and communicate with others of their own species even in pitch dark. The voltages these fish produce are tiny—too weak for a human to feel. But an elite few species have taken things one stage further, using electricity as a weapon.

  Despite its English name, the electric eel is not an eel at all. It is not related to true eels and has no marine stage in its life cycle. It is, in fact, a type of knifefish. These belong to the same superorder as catfish, carp, and characins, whose main common feature is the weberian apparatus—the tiny bones linking the ears to the swim bladder that give these fish their super-sensitive hearing. But it is the poraquê’s eel-like shape that is the key to its powers. Its tail makes up 80 percent of its body length, and almost everything in this part of the body, beneath the backbone, is electric organ (of the nonmusical kind). This is modified muscle tissue that, instead of converting the stored energy in blood sugar to mechanical energy, converts it to electrical energy.

  At the microscopic level, this organ (actually three separate organs, each with a left and right half) is composed of vast numbers of flattened electrocytes—minibatteries—that are stacked like poker chips down the length of the body. One of the organs, the Sachs organ, produces only low-voltage discharges of about ten volts for electro-location. But the voltage the other two organs produce is much higher. Each electrocyte produces only 130 millivolts when stimulated by a nerve impulse, but when large numbers are connected in series, the voltage starts to add up. Thus, a small eel can produce 100 volts, but a four-footer, whose electrocytes number in the hundreds of thousands, can produce 500 to 600 volts. This is the maximum voltage normally quoted. But a bigger eel will produce an even higher voltage. I’ve heard stories (from Peru) of electric eels growing to twenty feet, but the consensus of scientists is closer to eight feet. One of my aims was to catch an eel close to this size and measure its output, and in order to chart this unknown territory, I’d brought a voltmeter. Perhaps not surprisingly, some people I told about this before going to Brazil thought this was taking curiosity too far.

  These discharges are normally used to stun small fish and amphibians, both of which are then sucked in and swallowed, going quickly past the delicate membranes at the back of the poraquê’s mouth that it uses to absorb oxygen from air gulped at the surface, an ability that enables it to survive in poorly oxygenated water.

  But a human being like me is hundreds of times bigger than its normal victims. Nevertheless, in the records of the forensic science office at the town of Marabá, also in Pará state, there is a case in which an electric eel is cited as the cause of death. The victim was a twenty-oneyear-old farm laborer, Francisco Conceição Souza, who drowned in waist-deep water. An internal examination revealed no medical condition that might have caused him to faint or lose consciousness, so the pathologist, Dr. Ivo Panovich, concluded that a shock from the electric eel paralyzed the man, thereby causing him to fall in the water where, with no one able to pull him out, reflex breaths resulted in a fatal inhalation of water into the lungs. To see “peixe elétrico” (electric fish) written on an autopsy report sent a shiver through me. In this context the fish’s capabilities were much more than an academic curiosity. Perhaps more than any other fish, the poraquê makes water an alien element because it makes empty water an invisible extension of its body, where you can trespass without intention and pay the price without warning. Despite the strangeness of this notion, it was something I had to fix in my head to make sure I didn’t end up on Dr. Panovich’s slab.

  Visiting the farm where this fatality happened, I spoke to Fernando da Silva Nunes, the boy who witnessed it. He said that Francisco, newly arrived at the farm, wanted to go fishing in a small pond nearby, a scoop in the ground just thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. Fernando warned him against this, as an electric eel had shocked him there, but the man brushed off his concerns. Arriving at the pond, he waded out to his waist, leaned forward so his arms were in the water, and swept his woven palm basket along the bottom. After lifting the basket out and finding no fish inside, he repeated the procedure with the same result. On the third dip, only his hands and wrists had gone beneath the surface when he cried out and fell face-down into the water. Moments later, Fernando saw an electric eel encircling the man’s chest. After trying to pull it away with a stick, Fernando ran to his house for help, and when he returned with his uncle and grandfather, there was no sign of Francisco, so they thought he might have gotten out. But when they hit the water with a stick, something rose to the surface: the head of the missing man, lifted up by the poraquê, which was still coiled around his body.

  This creepy detail brought to mind something the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt had written. Humboldt wanted to examine some electric eels, but the Indians in the Venezuelan Llanos refused to fish for them in any normal way. Instead, they employed a novel way of dischargin
g the eels before catching them with harpoons tied to long pieces of dry cord, bringing them in “only slightly wounded.” To do this, they herded thirty wild horses and mules into a muddy pond and then forced them to stay there by beating them with sticks when the eels started to shock the trampling animals in self-defense. Several of the horses collapsed and drowned. “They attack the heart,” observed Humboldt, and on reflection, this is probably what happened to Francisco. From the eel’s point of view, a large creature was attacking it, and its initial shocks paralyzed the skeletal muscles. But it would have still detected electrical activity from one part—the heart—meaning that its attacker was still alive. So it delivered further shocks to this region of the body to extinguish this final sign of life.

  Using a long stick with a hooked end, the men finally pulled Francisco’s body to the side, still wrapped in the eel’s embrace right up to the moment it grounded in the shallows. With the corpse lifted clear, they then dragged the bottom and hauled the fish ashore, where it shocked one of the men when he struck it with a machete. They eventually killed it with a wood-handled hoe and hacked it into three pieces. The combined length of the pieces was just over six feet.

  This desire to exact revenge or to make the water safe is understandable. Fishermen routinely carry out preemptive executions of caimans and anacondas. But one story I heard, in which villagers drained a lake with buckets after a boy had been fatally shocked there, was a bit hard to believe. Then one day the crew and I called in at a roadside shop, whose owner had lost her son to an electric eel some years before. The owner wasn’t there, but a young woman customer told us an eel had shocked her dog just two hours before and then stated, “Everybody’s gone to drain the pond.”

  The place was barely a hundred yards away. At the edge of a field we entered some scrub and followed a short path to a felled tree that bridged a narrow ditch some twenty-five yards long and eight feet across. Below us, around the water’s edge, were about twenty people, mostly men and boys. Some were sweeping and jabbing the water with long poles. Others had plastic buckets and were forming a chain to tip water into another pond nearby. As we paused on the bridge, a thick serpentine form broke the surface underneath us, heading up the pond, and everyone yelled, “There it is! Kill it!” A moment later the water erupted just short of the far end. One of the men had a pole like a shepherd’s crook, with twelve inches of angled-back side-branch at its far end, and I now saw this swept down and jerked back. Someone at my side shouted, “Don’t kill it!”: we wanted to see it alive. But this lynch mob was deaf and purposeful. There was only one way this was going to end. Next time the victim could be a child, and what alternative could we offer? A long-handled billhook was already slicing the air on its way to the writhing black form.

  Hacked halfway through, bleeding and twitching, the corpse was taller than any of the men there. But more impressive was its girth. Behind the respiratory chamber in the head, electric eels have a very truncated gut cavity, with the vent opening shortly behind the gills. This creates a distinct hump behind the snout that, on this specimen, was as thick as my thigh, and it tapered only slightly to the tail. Its impressive profile was also due to the long anal fin, running all the way from the vent to the tail. When alive, this can ripple both forward and backward, enabling the fish to swim without flexing its body. Its color further accentuated its bulk: almost black on the back, shading into olive green, with a bright orange throat and red spots on the flanks like glowing coals.

  Having seen this huge fish and convinced now of their ability to kill humans, I was increasingly apprehensive about grappling with a live poraquê in the wild. So I thought it best to start with a small one in an aquarium. With the Brazilian-born ichthyologist Dr. Jonathan Ready at my side, I donned thick rubber boots (rated to 7.5 kilovolts) and gloves (1,000 volts) and lowered a plastic-handled probe into the water. The probe consisted of two copper strips, at opposite ends of a clear plastic rectangle, that were connected by wires to a receiver unit that converted electrical pulses in the water into sound. At first we heard only isolated deep-toned blips, but when I moved the probe toward the fish, the speaker emitted a sound like a small motorbike trying to start. Assured that this was just the Sachs organ emitting low-voltage pulses for electro-location, I dipped a bare finger in and verified that this was indeed below the threshold for me to feel. Then, with finger safely out—because their shocks can be felt up to three feet away in water—we prodded the fish and heard the speaker rasp a short, angry buzz.

  The next stage was getting it out of the water, which Jon did using a cotton pillowcase and two twigs as a makeshift dip net. Tipped onto a plastic sheet, the two-foot-long fish flapped feebly while we touched a copper terminal to each end—nothing like the writhing of a true eel, which still has all its tail muscle. The tiny eyes seemed to accuse us. What were we doing, two grown men in protective clothing, holding down such a puny creature? But the terminals were linked to a bank of LEDs, which flashed repeatedly as the eel discharged, indicating a pulse of at least one hundred volts. Without insulation, handling even this small fish would have been like sticking our fingers into a mains socket: it could have floored both of us.

  Having seen now what these fish were capable of and being reassured that the gloves and boots gave adequate insulation, at least on a small specimen, I was as ready as I would ever be to go after a big one in the wild. But where should I start? Normally one might get a lead at a fish market, but fishermen don’t fish for them and people don’t eat them, although those that are caught accidentally are sometimes rendered down for their oil, which is said to “contain electricity” and is believed to ease rheumatic pains when rubbed into the skin. (I’ve also met fishermen who treat cuts with anaconda fat, the original “snake oil.”) But I’d already seen and heard enough to give me a clear pointer. Now was the dry season, and the best places to look were shrinking, dryingout pools in the river floodplain. This is where electric eels breed, the male making a foam nest from his saliva, into which the female lays up to seventeen thousand eggs and where the firstborn larvae cannibalize the later-developing eggs and embryos. It sounds almost as unlikely as their reputed taste for vitamin-rich açaí palm fruits, which they cause to fall during the flood season by shocking the trees; or the Tupi myth that the ancestral poraquê received its powers when it was struck by lightning; or the fact that you can sometimes stumble upon this monster in tiny water bodies where you’d never find a big fish of any other species.

  I’d heard about a small pond on a cattle ranch where poraquê had been seen, but getting a boat there, several miles from the river, looked like being a problem. I had visions of us doing a reenactment of Werner Herzog’s epic movie Fitzcarraldo, in which hundreds of people drag a riverboat through the jungle. Brazilians, however, pride themselves on their ability to dar um jeito, to find a way. This is a special kind of lateral thinking, usually involving a bending of the rules. In this case the answer was a tractor driven by Milton Pereira de Freitas that swung an aluminum skiff out of the river, suspended by a rope from its loading arms, and set it down on a trailer. An hour later, after a bumpy ride over dried-out swamp, the trailer was reversed into the lake and we were in business.

  The lake was a winding thirty-foot-wide ribbon, and we slowly paddled down the middle with the receiver in the water. But the speaker emitted just ambiguous crackles and hums, nothing like the clear messages in the tank. Perhaps they were not on the move and were instead taking a siesta. I dipped another device into the water, a transmitter of low-level pulses, to maybe get a conversation going, but there was no response. So at midday I resorted to a bait on a line. Near the lake was a shallow ditch, and taking Milton’s bamboo fishing rod, I baited up with a small piece of cut fish and flicked it just beyond the marginal weeds. On the third or fourth cast the line jagged sideways, and my firm strike swung a silvery blur onto the bank. According to Milton, the slippery, gap-toothed traira is a preferred food of the poraquê, and also a favorite of his for e
ating sashimi-style, so we decided to catch a few more. I was also enjoying this back-to-basics fishing until the line got snagged next to a branch in the water. Having pulled to no avail, I shuffled out along the branch, with the water halfway up my canvas “ninja boots” (bought in Thailand, and the perfect footwear for deep mud), and I reached down the line with a stick. But I still couldn’t free it.

  “Just break the line and put on another hook,” Milton called.

  So I pulled, and something started to move. A tangle of mudclogged roots appeared, and in the middle of it was a sinuous gray form. Somehow I jumped vertically clear of the water and managed to come down on the bank while not letting go of the line. As the gray-brown fish squirmed in the grass, Milton chuckled, “It’s a mussum. They’re good bait for jaú, but you don’t often catch them on a hook.”

  Regaining some dignity, I held the fish, a marbled swamp eel (Synbranchus marmoratus), in front of the camera and reflected on my good fortune that it hadn’t been a poraquê. If I’d been shocked, at least there were other people around with rubber boots and a wooden-handled plastic hook for pulling me out, as well as a portable defibrillator for stopping a heart that has been shocked into spasm prior to restarting it with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

  Word then came of a place where the pools were almost disappearing, as the heat of this extra intense dry season baked the land far drier than in normal years. Walking through a parched landscape of singed trees with a farmhand named João, I spotted a pool in the distance, scarcely twenty feet in diameter and partially shaded by a small tree. On getting nearer, we saw the surface bubbling with four-inch armored catfish, sipping air. Then something that looked like a tree root slid out of the shade and into the body of the pool. Six feet long and snakelike, with the whole of its back out of the water, it could have been an anaconda, especially as the water, which was actually liquid mud, obscured any markings. But it moved without making lateral loops, and on a few occasions it went instantaneously into reverse. What’s more, its mouth was regularly pushing clear and opening, after which bubbles appeared from behind its arched head. I had found my giant poraquê—but how to get it out?