River Monsters (24 page)

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 half-decent 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 side-strain 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 towards me, its amorphous margins flowing into the craters left by retreating feet. In the centre 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 realise 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. The initial pain is so intense that in some
parts, I’ve heard, they call stingrays the ‘wish you were dead fish’. 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 on to 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 forwards 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 defence; 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 realised 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 desensitising of their electrical sense hasn’t proved to be an undue handicap.

I’ve also had the opportunity to see rays up close through a diving mask, ten feet down in a crystal-clear lagoon beside the Rio Teles Pires in the south of the Amazon basin. In this
aquarium-like setting, fed by springs bubbling up through white sand, I watched the rays glide and scuttle, powered by the graceful undulations of their flexible body margins, where the radiating
rods of stiffening cartilage are clearly visible.

In such surroundings, you get a sense of how pretty their blotched body patterns can be and even start to appreciate why some aquarists want to keep them as pets. Even the most common of the
twenty-plus species,
Potamotrygon motoro
, the ocellate stingray, resembles a hypnotic galaxy of dancing suns.

Some specimens are also among the biggest fish in the Amazon. In December 2000 US fishing writer Keith ‘Catfish’ Sutton caught a discus stingray (
Paratrygon aiereba
),
measuring six feet, two inches across and weighing 116 pounds, 2 ounces, where the Rio Branco flows into the Rio Negro, two hundred miles northwest of Manaus, and he also saw a bigger one the
previous January, perhaps seven or eight feet across. In Peru there is talk of rays nearly ten feet across. In 2001 I watched from the comfort of a hammock in a wooden fishing boat as my friend
John Petchey was reduced to a physical wreck by something he hooked downstream from Ilha Arraia (Stingray Island) in the Rio Solimões. After breaking John’s reel, this stingray finally
allowed our skipper Josimar to grab it through the spiracles and haul it aboard our jumbo-sized canoe. This was also a discus ray, sandy-coloured and a near-perfect circle, with a tiny afterthought
of a stingless tail and a body pattern like cells seen under a microscope. We returned it unweighed, but I guessed 80 pounds. I’ve also seen a couple of solid-bodied 100-pounders from the Rio
Purus that were caught on handlines.

But recently I’ve learned that these are not the biggest stingrays in fresh water. In 2008 I heard reports of giant whiprays (so called because of their extremely long tails, sometimes
more than twice the body length) being caught in Thailand, from the Maeklong (not to be confused with Mekong), and Ban Pakong rivers. These fish were so massive that some people are now claiming
this species,
Himantura chaophraya
, is the biggest freshwater fish in the world. Although Thai fishermen have doubtless known about this fish for generations, scientists only formally
described it and gave it a scientific name (the Chao Phraya is the river running through Bangkok) in 1989. This was on the basis of just three specimens, which is either an indication of their
rarity or the difficulty of catching them, or both. Now a group of scientists from Chulalongkorn University, working with British ex-pat angler Rick Humphreys and a team of Thai fishermen, is
trying to fill in all the gaps in our knowledge. By means of tags and a growing database, they hope to find out its growth rate, maximum dimensions, population size, and distribution – as
well as the chemical make-up and mode of action of the black viscous venom coating its barb.

Thailand is a well-trodden holiday destination, popular with backpackers, scuba divers, sex tourists, and affluent sun-seekers. But I was nervous about going there. After my first foreign
fishing trip, to India in 1982, I had managed to get a couple of articles published in fishing magazines, and I was digging around for another destination and another fish story. The articles paid
£40 and £25, which admittedly didn’t go far toward repaying my £285 air ticket and £160 travel costs (especially as I’ve yet to receive the latter fee). But
suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, I had a glimmer of a possible direction in life. I had visions of my writing making other trips possible and, maybe – who knows? – even turning a
profit. What I really needed to get things moving was a big story. I recalled an old picture I had seen in a textbook in the zoology department library at Bristol University. It showed an Asian man
in a coolie hat peeping over the top of a huge smooth-skinned fish: deep-bodied, blunt-headed, and with a tail that looked a yard wide. At first I thought the creature was blind, a monstrous
cave-dweller perhaps, until I noticed its eye low down near the corner of its mouth. The accompanying text said it was a Mekong giant catfish (although I could see no barbels). When I first saw
that picture, the fish’s home was a war zone. But when I called it to mind again, the Vietnam conflict had been over for nearly a decade. I started scouring the London ‘bucket
shops’ for a discounted flight and found what I wanted with Tarom, the Romanian airline. A couple of months later, in March 1984, I arrived in Bangkok.

In the meantime I’d found out a little more about my quarry. Unlike most catfish, the Mekong giant catfish, known as
pla buk
in Thailand, is a vegetarian that feeds on algae. No one
has ever caught a non-captive specimen on a line. Rather than being discouraged by this, I saw this as my story. I would be the first, possibly using some kind of stinky mashed paste bait of the
kind I’d used to tempt carp, which is also normally a feeder on tiny food items but catchable if you know how.

I headed for the northeast of the country, where the Mekong forms the border between Thailand and Laos. Because many countries are sensitive about their borders, I did the rounds of the
fisheries stations and obtained a letter of introduction explaining what I was doing. On top of that, a helpful English speaker checked me in with the border patrol police who, as if this were the
custom at police stations throughout the world, invited me to stay. Their sleepy outpost was right next to the river, and they seemed to enjoy the novelty of a foreigner in their midst, patiently
setting about trying to teach me Thai. But my inability to repeat even simple words with the right tones (low, mid, rising, high, falling) in the right places had them puzzled. If even infants and
halfwits could cope with this exercise, why did this foreigner insist on coming back with made-up nonsense words or completely different words entirely?