River Monsters (31 page)

I’d seen pictures of other snakeheads, but this one was a real stretched version: about four pounds of fish extending over two feet. A rosette pattern of scales on top of its head added to
the serpentine effect, and the mouth was wide and toothy beneath large eyes. Each jaw had a single row of teeth, which act as spikes for pinning prey, but this is only half the story. When the fish
shakes its head from side to side, the effect is like a saw, cutting large prey in half. The body colour was nondescript brown on the back and flanks, shading to a lighter tone on the belly. The
only punctuation was a couple of black flecks on each lateral line, edged with white, and the eye spot on its tail, which was black ringed with orange, from which it gets its name. It’s a
feature it shares with its new neighbours, peacock bass, which will sometimes hang near the surface with their head end sloping down, in which position this marking looks exactly like an eye to any
heron or other avian spear fisherman that fancies taking a jab at it. And it probably serves the same decoy function in the bullseye snakehead, as they often lurk very close to the bank. After only
an hour or two of fishing, I could tell exactly the kind of place where they would be – gaps in weeds, around sunken branches, under trailing bank-side vegetation – although sometimes
in a perfect-looking spot there’d be nobody home. If they were there, they’d strike on the first pass, but after my early success I was now missing fish after fish and cursing my
hair-trigger strike-reflex, which invariably pulled the bait out of their mouths. And unlike a peacock bass, which will get more and more wound up until it hooks itself, a missed snakehead
won’t hit a lure again. Alan explained that I had to override this and drop the rod on the take while winding up the slack that this creates – and then strike. In other words, I’d
probably connected with the first fish precisely because I wasn’t fully alert.

The bullseye snakehead normally lives in Southeast Asia. Lt. Pat Reynolds, who investigated the case of this illegal alien, found live snakeheads in the first Asian store he walked into and
traced the supply line to New York City via Miami. But this didn’t explain their presence in the wild. One theory cited the Buddhist custom of giving captive animals their freedom, but
Reynolds suspects that a Florida ‘entrepreneur’ had the idea of establishing his own local supply. Since then, federal law has prohibited the importation, transportation, or possession
of any of these ‘injurious’ fish anywhere in the United States. Aquarists who used to keep them say it’s easier to buy a gun than one of these fish.

But although the Florida canals are stuffed with snakeheads, there’s no evidence that they’re the ecological disaster that many fear, although all biologists would prefer that
they’d never arrived in the first place. Although it’s true that native Florida species now share their home with invasives, Paul Shafland has conducted research that shows that the
total biomass of native species has remained more or less unchanged over the last decade. In other words, snakeheads have not muscled out the native species (as filter-feeding Asian carp have done
in the Illinois River) but instead have somehow managed to live alongside them in a more complex ecosystem. (A similar situation seems to exist in the Potomac, where there’s now an
established population of northern snakeheads that anglers are catching to over ten pounds. Because it’s not practical to poison 380 miles of river, we can only assume that these are here to
stay.)

There’s also no evidence from the United States that snakeheads are a direct hazard to humans, although to be honest I didn’t see anyone swimming in the Florida canals and
couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to. To get to the bottom of their fierce reputation, I travelled to Thailand, to the mountainous region near the border with Burma, where two large lakes, Khao
Laem and Sri Nakharin, have been formed by damming tributaries of the River Kwai. As soon as I asked, I started hearing tales of extraordinary aggression: a child mauled, a man rammed in the leg, a
spear fisherman who had his mask smashed. Another fisherman, who was hose-diving in Khao Laem, breathing air from a compressor on a boat, had the tube ripped from his mouth and drowned. Another
died after his throat was ripped open.

The fish behind all of these stories was the giant snakehead (
C. micropeltes
). Already a few members of this species have turned up in the United States, thought to be released from
aquaria after their owners, who bought them as pretty red tiddlers, got tired of smashed tank lids and being bitten when they cleaned the glass – or when they found out that keeping them was
illegal. As yet, however, there are no signs that they have found one another and bred . . .

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. Listening to him, I realised that his observations are actually more detailed than any that scientists have made because his livelihood – and his life – depend on
them. Dar confirmed that snakeheads have a threat posture, facing you head-on with fins flared, but you mustn’t shoot at this point 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 towards a fry ball. His
wife, waiting in the boat, dived 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 of 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 out-reproduce 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 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 colour 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 towards it, and it dropped a fluky six inches short. Scarcely had I started the retrieve when a fish smashed into it and then crash-dived 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 realised 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 hence more heavily fished, 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 found 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 being 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 alloy-studded 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 catalysed 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 for anything, then there’s little point in it beating at all.

It was time to go. Dar was on the bow of the small boat, and I boarded behind him. He signalled 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 towards me, of black-and-white striped shapes. And when I looked back towards 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.