River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Disentangling takes time and care. With Dave holding the tail and body, I carefully worked the net free of the rostrum teeth using a screwdriver, leaving the rostrum tip until last. To free the final teeth, I was told to hold the end of the rostrum between thumb and forefinger, coming from the front, and to let go as soon as the net was clear. Then, giving its front end a wide berth, I moved in to straddle the fish’s back, a position that is safe from the rostrum unless the fish manages to flip onto its side and flex its body, which it can double into a full circle, thus touching its rostrum tip with its tail. A person trying to wrestle it in this position would risk getting a face full of rostrum teeth. Fortunately though, the fish telegraph their intentions by tensing before they kick, so you know when to hang on more tightly. But this seven-footer just calmly sat there and allowed us to get on with measuring and tagging. Although its back was in the air and its mouth was resting on sand, its spiracles were under the surface, and these simple flap valves on the top of its head were supplying clean water to the gills. I was struck by how similar this arrangement was to that in rays, to which sawfish are more closely related than to sharks, despite the sharklike rear half of the body.

  To attach the numbered tag, we punched a small hole in its cartilaginous dorsal fin and put the small disk of tissue thus obtained into a tube of alcohol for later DNA analysis. There are roughly half a dozen sawfish species worldwide, but the precise number is not agreed upon. The “freshwater” sawfish of Australia, Southeast Asia, and the coasts of the Indian Ocean is very similar in appearance to the largetooth sawfish of the western Atlantic, and they may in fact be the same species. Finally, a pinkie-sized acoustic tag was fixed to the second dorsal fin. This would transmit location and depth information to strategically placed hydrophones along the river’s course, anchored black capsules that are periodically retrieved in order to download their electronic memory onto a computer. “It’s a chunk of change,” said Jeff. “But the data’s more valuable.” Of particular value is the fact that fish movements revealed by this high-tech system are not influenced by the presence of a tracking boat.

  One clear finding so far is a strong correlation between the strength of the wet season and the numbers of new sawfish pups that make it up into the middle reaches. Our visit followed a particularly low flood season, and there were very few new recruits to the river’s sawfish population. Even though yard-long sawfish can swim in four inches of water, the chances are that most didn’t make it much beyond the tidal zone, so they were likely polished off by the more abundant predators there. This new insight explains the team’s concern about a proposal to divert the Fitzroy’s “surplus” monsoon water south to supply the human population of Perth. If nobody else would miss it, the sawfish certainly would.

  Once they reach the size of this netted one, however, sawfish can hold their own. This fish had the whole tip of its right pectoral fin missing: a crescent-shaped cut some eight inches long and still not completely healed—bearing witness to a nonfatal encounter with a bull shark. It also had crocodile tooth-marks in its head and flank, but these had bounced and slid across its tough hide, failing to penetrate. There are also reports of sawfish injuring people in self-defense when cornered in shallows or caught in a net. I even read in a newspaper archive that a flailing fifteen-footer off Darwin managed to hole a wooden fishing dinghy, and this certainly gave me pause for thought as I prepared to go after one with a line.

  Most line fishermen in these waters are after barramundi (Lates calcarifer ), a scaled-down Nile perch lookalike that is prized for its flesh and dramatic, leaping fight. A couple of times at night I almost jumped out of my skin as this predator nailed a surface-swimming baitfish from below, making a sound like a rock falling in the water as it snapped open its cavernous mouth. But anyone fishing with live- or deadbait on the bottom, rather than a lure, may hook a sawfish. And, sadly, some fishermen will kill an accidentally caught sawfish and throw it up on the bank to rot rather than attempt to unhook and return it. We found three yard-long sawfish dead beside one pool—a significant dent in a precarious population. Therefore, targeting them with a rod or handline is illegal. But because I was working with the scientific team, hunting specimens for them and under their supervision, I had the rare chance to experience this legendary creature on the end of a line.

  But I almost didn’t want to. Catching a fish is normally a very private thing for me, and somehow catching my first sawfish under camera lights with a scientific team standing by to process it didn’t excite me as much as the prospect of a solitary encounter. And failure is normally private too—perhaps that was it. Then I snapped out of it. The unique circumstances were in fact all part of being here. I took my mind away for a moment and reminded myself that fishing is about challenge, and that challenge should be welcomed and sought, not feared and avoided. It was time to finish the chapter that had started so strangely all those years ago in the middle of the Amazon.

  For a couple of hours, as the riverbank dimmed into moonlit dark, both lines hung lifeless, and I fished with little confidence. Then, suddenly, one line was running out. But when I engaged the drag and tightened, nothing was there. And there was no more activity that night. The next night I moved to a different spot, from where I could cast into an eleven-foot hole. Again, baitfish were scarce—just a handful of tiny mullet. Shortly after dark I missed a screaming run but somehow lost the bait. But when the next four-inch mullet was taken, I connected to a heavy fish. Out in the dark I could feel it scything from side to side, punctuated by heart-stopping jags as something raked the leader. It felt a bit like a stingray, lashing the line with its barb. But although Australia has big river rays—previously believed to be the same as those I’d caught in Thailand but just recently shown to be a separate species—I somehow knew this was a sawfish.

  Although I could tell it was a good-sized fish, on my heavy gear it tired quickly. Inside a couple of minutes it was aground on the mudand-rock bank at my feet, its rostrum in the air. What to do now? One swipe could sever the taut line even though my hard fluorocarbon leader had lasted the fight so far. I yelled into the darkness for help, and soon Travis, one of our aboriginal rangers, was there, coolly hooking the final two tusks with his second and third finger to immobilize the rostrum. Then the whole team was there and we pulled the fish onto the mud for measuring and tagging, all the while keeping a constant eye out behind us for crocs in case one came to investigate the commotion. With the data logged, I then had the chance, while squatting astride the fish with my hands lightly holding its head, to savor the moment.

  Here at last was the fish that had been swimming around in my head for the better part of twenty years. At seven feet long and with that double row of fearsome tusks glinting in the flashlight beam, it was certainly a monster in terms of appearance and size. But in my whole time here I had found no evidence of this creature ever using that weapon willfully against people. Even so, humans judge others, both human and nonhuman, by appearances, and our first reaction is to recoil from such outlandish beasts. It’s not a measured intellectual response but a visceral one, and it helps us to survive in a hostile world. But sometimes we get it wrong, and in the case of the sawfish I had been as guilty as anyone of being misled by my preconceptions. Maybe I wanted to believe that it was a homicidal flesh ripper and I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t because that in some way diminished my capture. But in truth I liked the twist to this tale, and as I let it go, I felt we somehow now shared our own private joke. Sure, if you’re a mullet or a bony brim, you should be very afraid. But from the human perspective, this animal is a gentle giant—more sinned against than sinner.

  This one, three or four years old, was just a juvenile, not yet quite ready to descend to the sea to start breeding. Once in salt water, the picture is, if anything, even more hazy. Sawfish don’t turn up very often off the Australian coast, but when they do, the sizes can be astounding. In 1926 a Sydney newspaper reported an eighteen-foot, two-inch fish harpo
oned in coastal shallows. Malcolm Douglas, croc hunter turned celebrated conservationist, once found a massive one in an illegal net in King Sound, though the fish was eventually left high and dry by the falling tide, with Malcolm and his mud-trapped companions unable to free it in time. (He also told me of the time he watched a sawfish feeding, slashing a shoal of mullet with its rostrum ablur and then circling back around to suck in the hacked and mutilated fish. In captivity, they’ve been seen to eye up individual fish before cocking sideways and hitting their target with a movement like a karate chop.) In 1985 Owen Torres, a retired pearl diver of Aboriginal-Filipino-Sri Lankan-pommy descent, caught a fish bigger than his seventeen-foot boat while up Willie Creek near Broome, although he never saw a single sawfish during all his time underwater. And in the same year a coastal fisherman I spoke to got a twenty-three-footer caught in his barramundi net.

  My mind returned to those fish Mitchell-Hedges caught, and armed now with the length and weight of my fish (seven feet long and seventy pounds), I did a back-of-envelope calculation. Most unreliable reports (such as those for fifteen-foot arapaima and sixteen-foot wels catfish) give weights that are far too low for the fish’s length. But Mitchell-Hedges’s weights are spot on. So perhaps I’m more inclined now to believe his report of a thirty-foot fish weighing over five thousand pounds.

  I pause for a moment and try to turn those cold numbers into a mental picture of a real, live, swimming animal, but my imagination, which I am used to sending into the unknowable depths, cannot summon or find it. Even though I’ve now touched a live seven-footer, a sawfish the size of a boat is too big and unreal to fit inside my head. Maybe a twoand-a-half-tonner is still out there somewhere, but I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. Given the state of the world’s sawfish population, such giants will likely never return.

  CHAPTER 18

  CAPTAIN COOK’S MAN-EATER

  To stick your hands into the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece.

  Barry Lopez, River Notes, 1979

  WHEN CAPTAIN JAMES COOK made his second voyage to what is now New Zealand in the mid-1770s, a man named Taweiharooa told him about snakes and lizards that grow to enormous size: “eight feet long, and equal to a man’s body in circumference.” Furthermore, these animals “sometimes seize and devour men.” But there are no snakes in New Zealand, and there are no large lizards. So what could these sinister creatures have been?

  When Cook made his wind-powered voyage from England in HMS Resolution, he went via the southern tip of Africa and the Southern Ocean, taking nearly nine months. When I went to New Zealand in March 2010, I had a much easier time of it. I left London’s Heathrow airport in an Air New Zealand Boeing 747 one afternoon and touched down in Auckland, on North Island, twenty-six hours later, having briefly stopped to refuel in Los Angeles.

  From six miles up, if there’s not too much cloud, you can see where you are. Sometime before landing in LA, I looked down through darkness and saw the bright grid of Las Vegas as the setting sun poured molten red light over the western horizon. Most of the other passengers dozed or watched films. Then a series of bright stepping stones led to our destination.

  But the journey’s second leg was entirely over ocean, a wide empty space where navigation has to be done by instruments. Sensors embedded in the aircraft feel the gentle pull of the earth’s magnetic field while others hear whispered signals from satellites. Others monitor the weight of remaining fuel while an electronic brain continually recalculates its position relative to the programmed destination. In Cook’s time, as now, a vital navigational instrument was an accurate and reliable timepiece. Even without this, he would have been all too aware of the slow passage of days and nights on his voyage. But when you hurl a human body-clock at 500 mph through the earth’s time zones, it goes completely to pieces. If this is in an east-to-west direction, fleeing the sun, it stretches time, lengthening both day and night. So although outside was dark, inside I was awake. On the screen in front of me I watched as we crossed the International Date Line and passed instantaneously from March 13 into March 15. This vanishing of an entire day was something that my tired but wakeful brain couldn’t comprehend. But the place on the map where it happened, the Kermadec Trench, south of Tonga, is home to far greater mysteries.

  The indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori, arrived by sea from Polynesia only seven hundred years ago—a much more recent colonization than that of Australia, which was fifty thousand years ago. One clue to the identity of Cook’s beast comes from Maori folklore, which is full of mythical beings called taniwha (pronounced tun-eefa). These shape-shifting creatures are notoriously hard to pin down. Maori elder Te Pare Joseph told me they are spirits that protect places, and if they are not acknowledged properly, by placing the correct offerings, they can be dangerous to humans. Sometimes they inhabit a harmlesslooking log or a rock, but when these slippery customers come more into focus, they commonly take the form of a giant eel.

  Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the eel in Maori legend is a mischief-maker, an emissary from heaven who was banished to wander the seas and rivers after pursuing its own agenda of cuckoldry and seduction when on a mission to Earth.

  The most obvious characteristic of all eels is body shape: long and thin, just like snakes. This could give rise to mistaken identity, particularly as most observers wouldn’t want to get too close. To improve propulsion, both dorsal and anal fin are greatly elongated and fused with the tail to form a continuous paddle around the rear half of the body. Most eels are marine, such as the congers and morays that lurk in reefs and shipwrecks, but sixteen species are found in fresh water, in temperate and tropical river systems around the world, except those draining into the eastern Pacific and south Atlantic. So there are no eels in South America, western North America, or West Africa (although, confusingly, some unrelated long-bodied fish are commonly called eels).

  Along with their body shape, the main characteristic of freshwater eels is behavioral. Every year there are two mass migrations: of adult eels swimming downriver on moonless nights to the sea and of elvers, their tiny young, swarming in their multitudes in the opposite direction. This is something that humans have been aware of, and exploited, for thousands of years. Eel spears, traps, and bones have been found beside Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland from the pre-agricultural Middle Stone Age of 6,000 BC. Archaeologists have discovered a five thousand–year-old eel-fishing camp in Nova Scotia. The Maori, too, have been trapping and spearing eels for centuries, smoking the surplus from the seasonal glut to see them through the lean times in between.

  For recreational fishermen, however, the eel has the distinction of being the fish that most of us don’t want to catch. I remember them with anything but fondness from my early days. Foot-long “bootlaces” swallowing the worms and maggots intended for other fish and tying themselves and the line in knots. Unhooking them was the devil’s own job, as they were impossible to hold still and coated our hands with slime that took forever to remove. Bigger eels, however, attract a select band of devotees. The British rod-caught record is eleven pounds, two ounces, and good-sized ones are sometimes caught accidentally. I once caught a yard-long three-pounder from an old dammed lake when night-fishing for carp with earthworms, and I thought it was a much bigger carp for the first few seconds until I realized that there was a very different feel to this fish.

  This was a European eel (Anguilla anguilla), a species that had mystified naturalists for centuries. Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, noted that they migrate to the sea in autumn. But where do they go then? And where do they come from? If you observe most freshwater fish long enough, sooner or later you will see them breed: carp churning up lake shallows or salmon thrashing in gravelly redds after their heroic journey from the sea. But nobody had ever seen eels breed. The idea took hold that they arose from “the entrails of the earth”—spontaneous generation. The Italian naturalist Francesco Redi was the one who, in the seventeenth century, first pu
blished the correct basics of the eel’s life cycle: that the eggs are laid in the sea and then the elvers ascend rivers. But nobody had ever found eggs inside an eel. Sigmund Freud, when he was a student of anatomy, was one of those who looked. The time he spent staring at eels—firm, smooth, muscular—while he dissected four hundred of them possibly influenced the future direction of his career.