River Monsters (17 page)

What’s more, there are still a few big piraiba around. In 2007 a fish measuring seven and a half feet was caught from the Teles Pires and estimated at 375 pounds. The Czech angler Jakub
Vagner recently caught one measuring eight feet, eight inches and estimated at 475 pounds. Meanwhile the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) has recognised as its new all-tackle record a
fish caught in May 2009 from the Rio Solimões (the middle reach of the Amazon) that weighed 341 pounds, 11 ounces, although from the looks of the photo, this fish probably did not survive.
And five years ago I heard about a remote stretch of jungle river where extremely big catfish, almost certainly piraiba, had smashed up insanely strong fishing tackle. Since then I’ve been
desperate to get there, but other commitments have prevented me so far. (There is a very limited window each year when the water conditions are right.) It’s very high up on my bucket list, as
long as time doesn’t run out for the piraiba first.

Giant piraiba are simply astounding – twice my weight or more – and their muscle power is legendary. In terms of a physical endurance test for an angler, surely there can be nothing
tougher in a river. They have unceremoniously sunk the canoes of local hand-liners, and to meet one at close quarters in the water, regardless of its intentions towards you or lack of them, would
be terrifying. And anybody who is sceptical of the stories of piraiba swallowing people would perhaps reconsider if ever in this position. For sheer size, power, demeanour, and rarity, I long
thought that a giant piraiba would tick more boxes than any fish I would possibly find in a river. Only after a long grey-and-white shape had pulled my boat five miles in three and a half hours on
another continent would I revise that opinion.

8

THE PENETRATOR

One pocket-sized fish that is guaranteed to put the willies up anybody who hears about it is the candiru. In the popular mythology of the Amazon, this fish swims up the urine stream of men who
are unwary and uncouth enough to relieve themselves in the river. Like salmon surging up a waterfall, they too are homing in on the smell of chemicals in the water, driven by a basic urge. But
unlike the king of fish, they are not driven to breed but to feed, although to the victim this is in effect a bizarre and painful form of sexual assault, as the fish disappears from sight up his
urethra.

This fish sounds like a very good reason for not going anywhere near the Amazon.

One day, on my first Amazon trip, Martin asked a passing fisherman if there were candiru here in this stretch of the Rio Purus.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see some?’

He picked up his machete and casually hacked off the head of a sixty-pound red-tailed catfish that was in his canoe, hooked it firmly to one of his handlines, and lobbed it into the river. He
then sat holding the line, and after five minutes he pulled it in, quickly and smoothly, hand-over-hand. As he swung it on to the riverbank, I saw that parts of the head were moving. Pale,
finger-sized shapes fell out of its gills and mouth and flopped on to the mud, where he scooped them up into the bowl-shaped gourd that he used for baling his canoe.

I picked one up, gripping hard to stop it from wriggling free, and it responded by vomiting circular gobbets of meat the same diameter as its mouth. With its soft, scaleless skin, it
didn’t feel like a fish at all but, disconcertingly, like the body part it is alleged to invade. Its short, fine whiskers identified it as a catfish, but its eyes were minute even by catfish
standards, like tiny reflective pinheads. We asked if the stories about this fish were true, and the man said he knew of two women who had been penetrated when bathing in the river. But when we
asked about men, he said no. That’s another type, smaller and thinner. He didn’t know how to catch this other type, at least not in a way that didn’t involve becoming a victim.
But I discovered a technique a few years later.

I was fishing the Rio Araguaia from an alloy skiff that had one of its bench seats modified into a live well, into which we’d put a couple of silvery papa-terra fish for catfish bait. On
the floor of this tank were two small valves, an inch across, that allowed water to circulate and stay fresh. After an hour’s fishing, I opened the lid to check inside and was shocked to find
many more fish than we had started with. The swarming newcomers were the length of a toothpick and must have squeezed in through the tiny gaps in the valves, having located the captive papa-terra
by smell – a revoltingly impressive feat. I scooped one out with an aquarist’s net and put it on my hand, where it shot forward with alarming speed and tried to burrow into the cranny
between two of my fingers. Scarcely overcoming my revulsion, I repositioned it and saw how it moved by wriggling its head from side to side, thereby ‘walking’ with the tiny,
backward-facing spines on its gill flaps, like a commando crawling on his elbows.

Normally the candiru would swim and wriggle inside the gill flap of a larger fish as the flap briefly opens to expel water that has passed over the gills. This water has lost some of its oxygen
to the fish’s bloodstream and also picked up small quantities of waste materials, ammonia and urea – the trace chemicals that, biologists think, lead the candiru to its target. Once
inside the gill flap, the host’s most vulnerable boundary layer is exposed: the complex system of thin membranes across which oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the fish’s
blood and the surrounding water. Here the candiru hooks itself into position so that the strong current that pulses through the gills does not blow it out, and it bites into the delicate tissue,
rich in blood capillaries. Gorging on its host’s blood, it expands to almost twice its body size before detaching and returning to open water.

With the candiru hanging from my hand by one of its spines, I could now see why they say that this fish,
Vandellia cirrhosa
, can only be removed by surgery if it ever finds its way into a
narrow human orifice. But has that ever happened? Reliable evidence is hard to come by in the Amazon. However, for the filming of
River Monsters
we tracked down the victim of one attack that
was very reliably documented, right down to internal video footage. Silvio Barbosa took me to the very spot where he was bathing with some friends in October 1997 on the banks of the main Amazon
River at the town of Itacoatiara. The water is a turbid yellowy-brown, and you reach it by picking your way down a gloopy mud riverbank – hardly Copacabana or Ipanema, but even landlocked
Brazilians are drawn to the local beach on weekends. Silvio and his friends had had a few cold beers, so after a while Silvio needed to answer the call of nature. He knew of the candiru’s
reputation, so he made a point of standing up, he says, in water that came up to the middle of his thighs.

He felt something that at first wasn’t painful, and he looked down to see about an inch of the fish still visible outside his urethra. He tried to grab it, but it was too slippery to hold,
and after a few moments it had vanished completely inside him.

Whatever he felt then, it got much worse. At the first hospital he went to, they didn’t believe his story. Meanwhile, his bladder felt on the point of bursting because he was unable to
urinate. He developed a fever and started to pass blood and pus. Three days later, his abdomen horribly swollen, he travelled 150 miles to Manaus, to the clinic of urologist Dr Anoar Samad. Medical
textbooks did not cover this condition, but something had to be done urgently. After putting Silvio under general anesthetic, Dr Samad inserted an endoscope into the urethra and found the fish,
which the sphincter below the bladder had blocked from further progress. By this point the candiru had died from lack of oxygen – not a problem it has inside its normal host – and to Dr
Samad, it looked as if it had tried to gnaw its way out through the side of the urethra. Aware that the fish wouldn’t normally come out backwards, he was considering making an incision in the
patient’s groin, through which he could pull it out head first. However, by this time the fish had started to decompose, so by grasping the fish near its tail with the pincers on the
endoscope and irrigating the urethra with distilled water, Dr Samad was able to ease it out in reverse.

Silvio came round and, after a course of antibiotics, made a full recovery. He was happy enough to talk to us about what had happened eleven years before and even feature in an impressionistic
reconstruction that used a squeezy plastic bottle of river water, although some worried that even this might offend the sensibilities of a prime-time audience. But our director Barny Revill still
felt that this was all rather abstract for television and thought of the plan to reunite Silvio with his fish. His candiru, it turned out, still existed, although in a dead state in a jar of
alcohol at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus.

On the day in question, Silvio seemed to be scanning the shelves rather eagerly. But with thousands of specimens in the temperature-controlled storeroom, we were confident he wouldn’t find
what he was looking for before we had the camera rolling. When the moment came, he declined the invitation to hold it or even touch it, and instead he just stared at it in my hand.

‘I never realised it was so big,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t really see it properly before.’ He explained that at the time, he’d still been groggy from the
anaesthetic and only saw something vague in a jar. This fish was 5.26 inches long, with a head 0.45 inches wide – a giant compared to those that I’d seen in the live well and, later,
falling out of the gills and mouths of catfish I caught, often leaking blood on to my hands if I picked them up. And once I saw several that were somehow attached to the flanks of a red-tailed
catfish I’d caught. Presumably, as they were ‘empty’ and translucent, they were waiting to move forward and enter the gills. The catfish waited without struggling for a few extra
moments before being returned, grunting quietly, as I flicked the parasites off.

Silvio’s story, although gruesome, had a happy ending – for him at least. But if he had lived further from specialist medical attention, there’s no doubt that he could have
died. This doesn’t mean that he feels like a lucky man. When I asked Dr Samad to quantify the likely levels of pain experienced, he replied, ‘This is somebody who has already paid for
all his sins, in this life and the next.’

So there’s no recorded case of the
Vandellia
candiru causing a human fatality, although in more remote parts of the Amazon there have likely been unreported cases in which both
parties have paid the ultimate price for their respective mistakes. However, tucked away on a nearby shelf in the INPA storeroom, there are some other fish that are on record as being implicated in
suspected homicides.

Dr Elizabeth Bezerra is a forensic pathologist who used to work at the Medical-Legal Institute (IML) in Manaus. At the rear of the building, away from those awaiting news or called in to
identify a family member, is an entrance where anonymous box vans unload steel trays containing the corpses of those who have died in suspicious circumstances. Gunshot wounds are commonplace. On
the day I was there, a suspected drug dealer in his twenties was wheeled past, his body bouncing slightly as the trolley turned the corner into the examination room, as if he was merely asleep. His
was a straightforward case of a gangland turf war settled in the most common way. I found myself thinking of him getting up in the morning, expecting another normal day.

Other cases, however, are less open-and-shut. One corpse that Dr Bezerra examined some years before had what looked like gunshot entry wounds, half an inch in diameter. What was truly
horrifying, though, was that the body had been hollowed out. Nothing remained inside the ribcage and abdominal cavity except a couple of small catfish. She sent these fish to INPA, who identified
them as the other, fatter type of candiru, the one I’d first seen on the Rio Purus. Local people know this fish as the candiru-açu (pronounced ‘assu’, or ‘candy-roo
AQ’ if you’re Ice Cube’s character in the dreadful film
Anaconda
), which means ‘big candiru’. Its body shape is also very different from the smaller candiru.
The local people have grouped them together on account of their similar bad habits, but genetically they are not closely related. It’s a good example of how everyday names can be confusing
and of the need for scientific names.