River Monsters (18 page)

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 behaviour 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 on to the deck of the house, still with their jaws fastened into their meal, a small dead fish.
Knowing this behaviour, 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 probably 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.’

9

RIFT VALLEY ROULETTE

‘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 fertilise 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 on to 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 the 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 into 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 pussy-footing 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 colourful 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 materialised, 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.