I'm jeremy wade,
Freshwater detective and angling explorer.
And the place that holds endless mystery for me
Is the amazon.
Now i'm heading back again on the mission of a lifetime.
Over the course of a whole year,
I'll go further and deeper into more remote and unknown...
River monsters territory than ever before.
It was hailed as the safest boat on the river.
But when the sobral santos sank
In the deepest part of the amazon,
Hundreds went down with it
In a catastrophe that dwarfs all my other investigations.
Many passengers mysteriously disappeared without trace.
At the very least, we're talking about 50 people.
At the most, as many as 300.
The amazon is the hunting ground
For a terrifying lineup...
Half of it's been taken.
Of the world's most ferocious river monsters.
Bit my arm.
One way or another, i have to uncover
What was behind the amazon apocalypse.
— captions by vitac — www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
The amazon rainforest covers tropical south america
In a cloak of vegetation so immense,
It would smother
More than 2/3 of the mainland u.S.
And the scale of the mighty river
That cuts through its heart is so vast,
It's almost impossible to comprehend.
To put it in some kind of perspective,
The amount of water flowing through the amazon
Is greater than the flow
Of the ganges, congo, yangtze, mississippi, and nile combined.
These tropical waters are so prolific
That the concentration of fish species
Is 10,000 times that of the ocean.
These include some very real river monsters.
When you think of all the aquatic predators
Patrolling these watery highways,
It makes navigating these rivers
A bit like driving a convertible through a lion enclosure.
And if there's one sure way
The people living along its endless shores
Come into contact with the amazon's river monsters,
It's when a boat goes down.
I learned portuguese
When i first came to the amazon 20 years ago.
It's an invaluable skill that opened many doors for me.
Just talking to the captain
About how potentially dangerous it must be
Navigating these waters with all the traffic,
Particularly at night.
And he said, "yeah, absolutely." and accidents do happen.
In fact, one of the crew members on this boat
Was involved in the salvage
Of a really horrendous accident that happened.
It was a passenger-And-Cargo boat called the sobral santos.
And, apparently, even though it happened quite a while ago,
The memory of that event still haunts people to this day.
Our boat mechanic, manel, was only 21
When he was sent to a remote brazilian town
To help recover the wreck.
It went down in a place called obidos,
Which is the deepest and narrowest part
Of the main amazon river.
Manel was accompanying a team of divers
On a massive barge fitted with a crane,
Which took five days to get to obidos.
He was assisting one of the divers...
And what he said was that when the boat was raised,
There were lots of bodies inside.
And because those bodies had been there so long,
There wasn't an awful lot left of them.
Lots of them had all their flesh missing.
He said the one thing that remains untouched
Generally was the hands,
But everything else — eaten away.
There was huge loss of life.
No one agrees on how many people
Were traveling on the boat that night.
Perhaps 430.
Maybe as many as 630.
Yet only around 180 survived.
The report from the official investigation has been lost,
So nobody knows for sure what happened to all the passengers.
Some were retrieved dead from the wreckage.
Others drowned,
And their bodies were recovered in the following days,
When they floated to the surface
As a result of natural decomposition.
But something doesn't add up.
When you take into account
The number of people traveling on the boat,
There was still some passengers unaccounted for.
At the very least, we're talking about 50 people.
At the most, it could be as many as 300.
Manel told me the boat didn't go down
In the middle of the river.
It was docked in a harbor.
I think something happened under cover of darkness
That stopped surviving passengers
Making it to dry land.
If this is the work of a river monster...
Then this catastrophe has a greater death toll
Than all my other investigations combined.
I've got to find out the truth
About what happened to the passengers
Of the sobral santos.
The boat made a regular journey,
Carrying passengers and cargo
From the port of santarem
To the city of manaus 450 miles upstream.
It was when it stopped to pick up passengers
At the small port of obidos in the middle of the night
That disaster struck.
This is the place.
This is where the sobral santos went down.
But will anyone really remember
What happened here more than 30 years ago?
And could whatever was lurking in the water then
Still be around now?
There's only one way to find out.
I've got to get a line in the water.
But with so many large boats coming and going,
Fishing is prohibited from the working dock.
Instead, i'm taking a position on the shore
Next to the dock warehouse,
Where the bodies recovered from the river were stored.
Just as every journey begins with a small step,
Every mystery begins with a small clue.
You've got to start by getting something
That the predators are likely to feed on.
So i'm actually fishing for small fish at the moment.
I've just got some light line,
Just to see if i can pick up something
Probably just a few inches long, is what i'm after.
If i can get some fish like that,
I'm then in a position
To really go for what i'm really after.
Pretty good baitfish there.
It's a tetragonopterus —
Sometimes collected for aquaria but the perfect size for me.
It's the kind of fish that could bring in larger predators.
If i get a few more to use as bait,
I'll be ready to move up to bigger gear.
But it seems i've got some competition.
Whatever that was, it's taken the hook.
It's actually bitten the line.
In these waters, even the small fish are formidable predators.
Got something.
This is actually a bit of a turn off the hook.
Even right off the dock.
We've got piranhas.
Even on a fish this small,
Those teeth are still pretty vicious.
So, could this be my first suspect?
Contrary to popular belief,
Redbelly piranhas are mainly scavengers
And only attack humans if exceptional circumstances.
That was actually quite a surprise
To catch a piranha here.
It's a fish that is normally found in the lakes,
Rather than the main current of the river.
But the fact that they're here next to the port
Doesn't necessarily implicate them
In what happened after the boat accident.
They're a sight feeder.
They're more active during the day.
The boat accident happened at 3:30 in the morning.
Is it possible all the noise and movement
Could have awakened them and triggered an attack?
It would take a huge number of piranhas
To dismember so many bodies.
Piranhas normally are found in actually fairly small groups.
You know, they're not in groups of hundreds.
They're in groups of maybe 30, something like that.
So although they're here,
I don't think they were a significant factor at all
In what might have happened to the people.
Still, the lethal weaponry
Deployed by even small fish here
Indicates how unforgiving life beneath the surface is.
Although the disaster happened more than 30 years ago,
I'm hoping someone in the town will have some details.
That's interesting.
Stories of screams coming out of the dark,
People getting eaten alive by something in the water.
Even though this is something that happened a long time ago,
It's clearly still very much alive
In the minds of people here.
But i still haven't spoken to an actual eyewitness
Until i track down the former harbor master
Who was on duty that night.
The first thing that manel de sousa says
Is that in the early 1980s,
Obidos had very little electric lighting
And none in the port.
The accident happened at 3:30 in the morning, so it was dark.
The boat had to do a bit of a turn as it came in close,
'cause there's an eddy close to the banks.
The deep, swirling water means mooring at these docks
Is always fraught with danger.
So it's maneuvering so that it's coming against the current,
Alongside the pontoon.
As it drew alongside, it tied up.
He tells me that as a crowd of passengers
Move to one side to get off, the boat began to lean heavily.
Then the next thing that happened
Was that it drifted away a bit and the cables broke.
And in an instant, hundreds of people were plunged
Into the deadly waters of the amazon.
And the carnage that followed has seen no equal.
I'm investigating the amazon's worst riverboat disaster...
In the deepest part of the river.
I've learned that over the following days,
Fish consumed the passengers who died on board.
Lots of them had all their flesh missing.
And also that immediately after the accident,
Many passengers struggling on the surface
Suddenly disappeared, just yards from the dock.
Some say they were eaten alive.
The harbor master was right on the dockside.
But with no lighting...
The disaster zone was pitch black.
It was really too dark to see what was happening.
But in the town at that time,
There was a diver who worked with a gold-Mining team.
The diver volunteered to go down and help with the rescue.
He went in, and he came up a very short time later
And said, "there's something very large down there."
When the people asked him, "well, how do you know that?
It's impossible to see," he said, "just by the movement.
There's something moving down there."
And apparently he refused — he said, "that's it.
I'm just not getting into the water again."
So no one dared to approach the sunken boat
On the night it went down.
Daybreak revealed an apocalyptic scene.
The river was awash
With half-Eaten bodies and body parts.
Was some kind of river monster to blame?
The amazon is not lacking in suspects.
With more than 3,000 species of fish alone,
My challenge is immense.
Made all the harder,
Because the waters here at obidos
Are exceptionally deep and turbulent.
This outcrop of rock is the significant feature here.
This is the reason the river is so narrow here.
You can actually see the far bank quite clearly,
Whereas in a lot of other places on the main river,
It's just this thin, gray line in the distance.
But because it's so narrow,
The river being squeezed into such a small gap,
It's also very deep.
We've got 200 feet beneath us.
And, also, the current is very, very strong.
These unique conditions create a dangerous, swirling eddy
Right in front of the dock
Where the sobral santos moored up.
Because of the strong current,
Fishermen can't set static nets but fish them on the drift.
And it's no place for a rod and a line.
A bait cast from the bank would never hold position,
And nor would an anchor.
I'd risked being dragged into the path of oncoming boats.
But i do have another option.
Many fish patrol and even seasonally migrate
Up and down the amazon.
So if this part of the main river is unfishable,
I may find what i'm after in the tributaries.
Oh! Took on the way down.
That's a piranha.
There are too many similar-Looking
Piranha species to be sure of its identity,
But there's one thing i do know.
If they're out in numbers,
Then things might get difficult.
And from the telltale tapping on the line,
It doesn't feel good.
It's another piranha.
Small groups of these sight hunters
Couldn't account for a massacre in the middle of the night,
But they would have been quick
To come in and scavenge the next day.
The thing about piranhas is they very often
Get to the bait before anything else.
So they actually prevent you
From finding out what else is down there.
Changing location is the only way
To avoid their unwelcome advances.
Yeah.
Hey.
Very nice, streamlined, scaly fish. Interesting.
Even a pretty, little silver fish like that is a flesh eater.
Took a little piece of fish.
One thing is clear from fishing these backwaters.
There's a solid foundation of prey.
If you've got small fish like that,
You would expect, normally,
To have bigger fish feeding on them,
Right the way up the food pyramid
To the very large predators.
But the water conditions are making the job harder.
I've arrived in obidos at the peak of the flood season.
The river has burst its banks and is spreading far and wide,
Allowing freshwater predators to disperse
Into a vast area of rainforest.
However, the dock has become a reef of sunken structure
In 20 to 30 feet of water,
Providing extra hiding spaces and ambush opportunities
For deep-Water hunters.
If i can fish from the site where the boat went down,
I might yet discover a monster.
But before i get the chance, some cargo handlers tell me
A huge creature recently surfaced nearby.
They said there was a very big caiman here just last year,
Where about 100 yards from the port —
Something like that — it came up.
Somebody tried to lasso it.
It went down again, came up again.
They said it was very big animal.
They said, like, 15, 18 foot.
I don't think it was as big as that,
But it clearly made an impression on them.
Eventually, it submerged,
And it headed off in the direction of the port.
It came up again there, and then it disappeared.
If i think of a creature strong enough
To tear limbs from the bodies of the living,
Then top of the list has to be the caiman.
If this relative of the alligator
Can't swallow its prey whole,
It swings and twists off manageable chunks,
And that might account
For the body parts floating on the river.
This town has grown a lot since the disaster,
And underwater, it's not the same river that it was.
So if i'm to find the evidence i need,
I may have to cast my net wider.
I've heard about a man who has firsthand experience
Of the violent power of a giant caiman.
I'm hoping he can offer an insight
Into what a caiman could have done
On that terrible night.
But to find him, i have to venture
Into what they call the igapãƒâ³ —
The flooded forest.
Right now, it's right at the height of the flood season.
In parts of the amazon,
You're talking about a 50-Foot rise in water level.
Here, we're pretty much among the tops of the trees.
So we're able to take the boat right into places
That would otherwise be dry land.
Rising water allows us just enough depth
To sail through these temporary creeks
And opens up shortcuts to remote locations.
But the creatures that live in the water —
What this means is that instead of being confined
To the river channels,
They are now spreading out into the forest
And their territory is greatly increased.
Right now, giant caimans have free rein.
But water that's too high
Could see us caught in the canopy.
And once inside a narrow creek, there's no turning back.
At last, the isolated creek
Where attack survivor adamor lives.
He has to rely on his younger sons for everything,
As he can barely walk.
To avoid the floodwater,
He confines himself to the upper floor.
The attack happened 15 years ago,
But it left a permanent reminder.
So, he's walking along in the water —
This shallow water — and he said suddenly,
Almost out of nowhere,
This caiman just launched himself at him.
This is the thing.
You know, they can be there, and you just don't know it.
And the upper jaw made contact with his chest.
And then the lower jaw in the stomach.
In no time at all, he was covered in mud.
He couldn't see anything.
He was shouting. He was screaming.
And this thing — he says it was shaking and shaking him.
He said he could see its eyes, so he put this thumb in its eye.
He thinks because his thumb was in its eye, it let go.
From that point on, it didn't bite him again.
It just went off a little distance.
He said it was just sitting there,
Just waiting for him to die.
He said there were basically,
You know, just flaps of skin hanging.
So he had his guts hanging out from his abdomen,
And he said," the upper region here, you could see bone."
Adamor would have died had not an elder son
And a neighbor heard his screams.
When they found him,
They had to push his mud-Covered intestines
Back into his abdomen before carrying him away.
Although he was stitched up at a hospital,
His infection raged for months, and it took more than a year
For him to get back the feeling in his chest and belly.
It's a miracle he survived at all.
The thing about this place, this region,
Is just because of the nature of it,
The people live a very aquatic life.
They have no choice but to engage with the water
And come into contact
With the creatures that live in the water.
Now, adamor survived his encounter with the caiman
Thanks to a combination of physical toughness,
Presence of mind, willpower, and it has to be said,
Quite a big dollop of luck, as well.
But for most people, in that situation,
Meeting an animal like that,
The outcome is gonna be very different.
This horrific account shows how easy it would be
For a caiman to tear a vulnerable human
Limb from limb.
But did they play a part in the carnage
When the boat went down?
The disaster happened in the middle of the night
And in very deep water.
I'm not sure whether caimans attack in those conditions,
But there is a way to find out.
Caimans have tried to steal my catches at night before,
But that was in shallow margins.
Hey! Go on! Hey! Get out of here!
I'm gonna try and just pull this up on the side.
Oh
Tonight, i'll use a fish to set a trap.
I want to hook a fish
And let it create a commotion on the surface of deep water
To see if it triggers an attack by any caiman out there.
It's a risky operation
In a small boat in deep water in the dark,
But it's my only option to find out
If caimans should be on my suspect list.
He's taken the line.
I'm in the amazon,
Hunting down the perpetrator of lethal attacks
On passengers escaping
The river's worst boat disaster.
Hundreds of people disappeared that night,
And there are plenty of potential suspects
Lurking in these murky waters.
He had his guts hanging out. He was screaming.
I'm trying to discover if black caimans
Will attack in deep water after dark.
He's taken the line.
But the fish i've hooked to bait a caiman
Is a lot more powerful than i expected.
This is a piraiba.
But it's a small one.
It's strange to talk of a fish as small
When it puts a bend in the rod like that,
But these grow much bigger than this.
A couple of hundred pounds and up.
It's good to see my first large predator in these waters,
But i need something smaller and much more manageable
For my caiman test.
But interesting to see it.
Could piraiba be contenders for the attacks on the passengers?
I know some have the potential to swallow a man whole.
But these giants are at the top of the food pyramid
And just aren't very numerous.
At this stage, i don't think they could account
For the scale of the carnage.
I haven't seen a single eye shine from a caiman.
Perhaps my chances of attracting one
Are very slim in the middle of all this floodwater.
I need some more local intelligence
If i'm to pursue this line any further.
While asking around about any recent caiman sightings,
I'm told fishermen recently lassoed a giant.
It's now being held at a research facility,
Which might give me the access i need to test
Whether caimans could cause so much carnage in one night.
So, it was captured in an area where people live,
Where people get in the water.
They wash. They wash their clothes or whatever.
It's a big animal. It's about 131/2 foot long.
It's over 500 pounds in weight.
When they got it here, they discovered
That it was actually blind in one eye.
This is probably why the fisherman was able to lasso it.
It's gonna stay here for a little while,
And then it's gonna be released.
It's gonna be released in a reserve
Where it's not gonna come and bother people on the waterfront.
There's no doubt caimans attack humans,
But how would they account
For the huge number of missing passengers?
Either there was a massive number of caimans
At obidos that night or each predatory reptile
Was taking down one passenger after another.
To test the multiple-Victim theory,
I'm under the supervision of a reptile vet,
And i'm scaling up my line and bait big-Time
To trigger a first strike.
Now i have its undivided attention.
I'm just trying to see how motivated it is
To hang on to that meal.
I've used pig as bait,
As i'm told its flesh tastes very similar to human.
I don't think that's a grip that's very easily broken.
This beast's instinct
Is to hold on to its prey at all costs.
Why would they risk losing a catch
By attacking multiple people in a matter of minutes?
Time to cut and run and find out about the other theory.
In a river as vast as the amazon,
Could there have been hundreds of caimans in the area
When the boat went down?
Anselmo defronseca has studied their populations in the wild.
He said the thing about obidos is that the river there is,
By amazonian standards, it's narrow,
There's a strong current,
And this isn't the preferred habitat of caiman.
They prefer calm water.
They prefer backwaters, lakes.
So he said it's very unlikely
That they would come close to a city close to people.
They don't tolerate caiman.
So at the time of the boat disaster,
Caiman numbers were very low.
This knocks them off the top-Contender spot.
Something else is out there.
Just as the amazon dwarfs the world's other rivers,
The scale of its biggest disaster
Overshadows all my other investigations,
With the staggering number of people
Who were killed, injured, or went missing —
On one night.
One of the boatmen has told me
That most of the bodies recovered from the accident
Were buried in town.
But confusion still reigns over the numbers involved.
It's usually a matter of family honor
To keep the graves of loved ones
In good condition.
But in the middle of the cemetery,
I find a line of graves that are near derelict.
This is where the victims are buried.
Some of them identified, but mostly not.
There's two reasons for this.
Here in the tropics,
It was necessary to bury everybody quickly,
Certainly long before word could be got out to family
Who could then arrive at the scene.
Also, because, apparently,
A lot of the bodies weren't intact,
They were burying body parts, and this was pre-Dna testing.
So this is why, to this day,
Nobody knows for sure exactly how many people died.
It's estimated that these mass graves hold
As many as 200 bodies.
But because they were unidentified,
No one knows who's here.
And i now suspect that a similar number
Could have stayed in the water, victim to who knows what.
So, what exactly did happen?
I feel i owe it
To the passengers and crew of the sobral santos
To search for an answer.
Just as i'm leaving the cemetery,
I meet a mother and daughter
Visiting one of the few marked graves.
Both survived the disaster, but one of their family didn't.
The mother agrees to meet with me later by the river
To tell me what happened to her
The night the sobral santos went down.
She said that the family was actually moving to manaus.
So she got on the boat with her four young children,
Between the ages of 7 and 2.
To start with, there's lots of space.
She says three boats normally operated this route.
But one was out of service,
And the other had just broken down.
So the sobral santos
Was taking on all the passengers and cargo.
More and more people got on.
She said it was getting to the point
Where it was just ridiculous.
There were so many people on,
The hammocks so densely packed together.
And it actually got to the point
Where she was wanting to get off.
But by that time, in fact,
The boat was already in the middle of the river.
It had just left without, really, any notice.
So she's on the boat, traveling.
She said, though, that she wasn't sleeping.
She was very worried.
So when the boat arrived in obidos, she was still awake.
At 3:30 in the morning,
She heard a crash, shouting, and then scraping metal.
Within minutes, her life would be changed forever.
Find out what it is after this.
On my first trip to the amazon.
I'm scouring the mighty amazon river
To uncover the killer that tore into passengers
Trying to escape
From the river's biggest boat disaster.
A survivor, juscelina colares, has bravely agreed to meet me
Right by the place where the boat went down.
She said the first thing that alerted her
To something being wrong was a crashing sound
Made by falling bottles on the upper deck.
She jumped down from her hammock
And actually went straight into the water,
Because the boat was already in the process of tipping over.
She's under the water,
And she has some kind of crate that's trapped her foot.
She had to rip her foot out,
And she said, in the process of this, it cut.
Her foot was bleeding.
She came to the surface.
One of her sons surfaced next to her and hung on to her.
That was when she grabbed hold of a bench floating past.
At that point, she was actually in the middle of the river.
The boat was gone, and the waters of obidos
Were filled with battered and bleeding passengers.
It was the perfect storm
That put weakened prey right in front of predators.
It was very dark. You could see a certain amount.
But she said there was lots of screaming.
And then just gradually they, one by one,
Disappeared under the surface.
It was then just silence.
She was bleeding quite heavily from her foot,
And people actually said to her, "you were lucky
You weren't attacked by something in the water."
A boat found them in the darkness
And took them to the hospital,
Where they were treating two of her other children.
But her two-Year-Old son, rui, was missing.
His body was found in the river the next day in the afternoon,
So he didn't survive.
Although this disaster happened more than 30 years ago now,
It's very clear that the memory of it is still very much alive
In the minds of many people.
I think what i find most chilling
From juscelina's account was her description
Of how all the people around her, screaming on the surface,
Gradually became silent one by one,
As they disappeared beneath the surface.
And the other thing it really —
And the other thing it really brings home to me
Is how just the magnitude of this incident
Just far surpasses anything that i've looked into before.
Juscelina's tragic testimony is starting to fill in
Some of the missing pieces of this puzzle.
Yet so much still remains a mystery,
Even though the boat went down right off the edge of the dock.
What exactly is in these waters?
I'll need to pursue every lead,
Examine every contender, however tenuous,
If i'm to uncover
The perpetrator of the horrific carnage.
Alongside the piraiba, the amazon's
Other superheavyweight is the arapaima.
I felt the full weight of one of these,
And it left me injured for weeks.
But they aren't found in fast-Flowing rivers,
And their method of attack
Doesn't fit the victims' injuries.
An arapaima either rams its target
Or crushes prey against the roof of its mouth.
They don't strip flesh or tear limb from limb.
What i'm really looking for
Is a predatory fish that's large enough
But also which is present is significant numbers.
One way to see what other heavyweight predators
Operate in the amazon is to check out the fish market.
The largest one is right in the heart of the rainforest.
Fishing boats bring their catches here
From hundreds of miles around.
To get there, i'm completing the intended journey
Of the sobral santos
Almost 350 miles upstream to manaus.
This is a thing called a cuiu.
It's not a catfish, but it's got armored plates,
As well as having on the head.
It's got this row of sort of bony scales down the side.
Some people call these ripsaw catfish.
It's almost like the teeth of a saw coming down the side.
Quite a small mouth.
But strong enough to vacuum up crustaceans
And insect larvae from the riverbed.
But when the forest is flooded, like now,
It prefers seeds and fruit.
And what's interesting is
That they've hacked through the fins here.
They've hacked through there.
Hacked through there.
Basically they've got pointed spines on there.
And if you shove a load of these in a sack
And then someone puts them on their head, it's gonna hurt.
So...
This is arowana. They feed on the surface.
You often find them right up on the surface of the water.
They've got this mouth that just opens up.
It's a bit like the back of a cargo plane, almost.
Predatory fish.
Little teeth around the edge.
Some interesting fish,
But not the variety or size i saw last time i was here.
Yeah, he's just said that the only big fish
I'm likely to see today are these.
And these actually aren't very big as arowana go.
So these were caught fairly locally.
This is interesting.
These are actually farmed, which is something that's happening increasingly.
It's taken the pressure off the wild stock.
It's actually forbidden to catch these in the wild,
Except in certain circumstances.
With a bit of luck, they might start coming back in the wild as a result.
I'm not seeing any obvious suspects at the fish market,
But i've got another place to check out —
A fishing-Tackle shop
That's got an extraordinary display
Of bizarre catches collected over the decades.
These mummified fish might give me an insight
Into what could have been in the river
When the boat went down.
Hanging from the ceiling is a rogues' gallery of specimens,
But one stands out in size alone, at around 8 foot long.
Well, at first sight, this could be a large piraiba,
But looking closer, absolutely not.
Five gill slits.
One, two, three, four, five.
And the teeth give it away.
This is a bull shark. This is a bull shark.
Where did this come from exactly?
Well, the story behind this bull shark
Is that it was caught about 30 years ago in the mid-'80s,
Thereabouts,
And apparently it weighed something over 200 pounds.
Came in on a fishing boat, probably on a long line
That the fisherman had put out for catfish.
But, yeah, quite a beast.
Bull sharks are one of the few sharks
That can survive in freshwater.
They've been found 2,500 miles up the amazon from the ocean,
Way past obidos and manaus.
One even attacked a woman near here back in the 1980s.
So this ferocious predator was around
At the time of the obidos boat disaster.
It's a lead i have to follow up.
At the harbor, i hear recent reports
Of multiple dorsal fins breaking the surface.
If these known man-Eaters are are numerous
As these reports suggest,
Could bull sharks have played a part
In the amazon apocalypse?
I'm traveling the mighty amazon river
To uncover the killer that tore into passengers
Trying to escape
From the river's biggest boat disaster.
My latest suspect — the bull shark.
I've found a specimen that places this known man-Eater
In the right place at the right time
For the attack.
And i've found a boatman named bacaral
Who has decades of experience on the river.
I asked him about bull sharks,
And he said that there's a belief
That they follow boats up the river.
People are throwing food and bits and bobs
Off the back of the boat, and they follow them up.
But are they here in enough numbers for a mass attack?
He says now it's pretty well unheard of.
You just don't see them.
And even in the old days, they used to be very rare.
A fish so scarce here
Couldn't be responsible for so much carnage.
Another contender falls off my list.
But all is not lost.
He says there's another large predator in the river.
These grow as big as the bull shark in tackle shop
But are faster and more agile,
And there's a lot of these lethal hunters out there.
He says it's actually very common
To see five or six of them together.
On occasion, maybe as much as 20 or even more than that.
Huge backs breaking the surface.
The alien-Looking amazon river dolphin —
The boto.
These top predators are here in large numbers
And aggressively compete with fishermen on the river.
Unlike its marine cousins,
The boto is no fun-Loving dolphin.
Its reputation is a lot darker.
It turns out people are actually wary of these animals.
They are well-Known to knock their canoes...
And actually tip them out of their canoes into the water.
They're said to be enchanted, but not in a good way.
Some even say they can change into human form
To lure people to their death in the river.
Many people here refuse to get in the water
When there are botos around.
Often covered in battle scars,
They've even been known to attack and kill bull sharks.
But it doesn't stop there.
I've been talking to some people around town,
And it turns out a few people have been hospitalized by botos,
By being rammed by them.
There are all sorts of estimates
For calculating the force a boto can deliver,
But numbers don't have the same impact as a demonstration.
To get an idea of it, it's something a bit like this.
Being hit by a boto is like being in a car
When it hits a brick wall at 30 miles an hour.
So i'm left with the question,
Is the river's largest predatory mammal
A serial killer?
I've been told there's a place nearby
Where wild botos are known to congregate,
Around a desolate house
That's succumbed to the rising floodwaters.
I got close to botos once before.
They were big, not at all afraid of me...
Oh!
And they made me very uneasy.
They really definitely have a dark side.
That was five years ago.
But back then, i didn't know half of what i know now.
The only way i'll find out
Whether they could have gone after the boat victims...
Is to see whether they'll go after me.
In the heart of the amazon, i'm on the hunt
For the perpetrator of an apocalyptic attack...
On the survivors of the river's worst-Ever shipping disaster.
Could it be one of
The amazon's top freshwater predators —
The otherworldly boto river dolphin?
The question now is, how are they gonna react to me?
Is there anything behind the legend
That they lure people to their deaths in the river?
There's only one way to find out.
These animals can attack in two ways —
With dozens of sharp teeth
Or a head butt that can take out a shark.
And i've got no idea how many of them know that i'm here.
These things — they seem to just appear from nowhere.
I think i'm under surveillance
By a group of six or seven predators.
I'm very wary
Of the unpredictable nature of wild animals,
Especially ones that aren't afraid of me.
You get the sense that they're definitely checking you out.
They're checking me out, and i have to submit to it.
But they're trying to see if i am, well, maybe food,
But also they want to see if i'm a threat.
And i think if they see me as a threat, that is bad news for me.
There's no way i can swim away from them
Quicker than they can swim.
There's no way i can resist them, either.
These are solid. They're big. They're solid.
I get the feeling it's very much on their terms.
And i'm very much out of place when i'm in their murky world.
Their hyper-Flexible necks and rotating flippers
Enable them to pursue prey amongst
The submerged tree trunks of the flooded forest.
Their ability to communicate with each other
Lets them coordinate attacks on prey.
And echo location means they can home in on objects
As small as a pin in murky water, even at night.
They would have no problem
Negotiating a boatful of passengers
As it sank beneath the surface.
So, what happened on that night when the boat went down?
Were dolphins in any way involved
In the carnage that people describe?
Well, first of all, were they there?
Were they at the scene? And i have no doubt that they would have been.
At that time in particular,
Dolphins were very numerous in the river.
They would have been aware that something was happening.
And there's no doubt
These formidable hunters are armed and dangerous.
But when it comes to humans, the boto has one weakness —
Its jaw muscles.
The boto's tooth-Lined beak
Is perfect for seizing and gripping slippery fish,
But it doesn't have the crushing vice-Like power
Of the caiman.
They can deliver a crippling head butt
Against people who provoke them,
But they can't rip limb from limb.
Their probing curiosity makes me feel uneasy,
But i've seen no unprovoked aggression.
And although that curiosity could have drawn them
Right into the middle of the chaos
The night of the accident...
I don't think they were responsible
For any of the carnage that the witnesses describe.
But something in this water was.
I've now investigated all the obvious suspects —
The amazon predators large enough to take out humans
And that have been known to do so.
But none of them can account for the scale of this massacre.
So, i'm wondering, whether it's the number
Rather than the size of perpetrators
That's the key to what happened in the waters of obidos.
Perhaps the sheer quantity of killers
Accounts for the carnage.
If there's one group of people
Who will know which fish are most numerous here,
It's the town's fishermen.
Although it was a long time ago,
They still remember the incident,
And what they remember in particular,
That it was a hard time for fishermen,
Because there was a ban imposed on fishing
For a number of weeks afterwards.
And the reason for that was
People were starting to catch fish
With human remains inside.
Everything had either attacked or scavenged
The bodies in the river.
Eventually, fishing resumed.
But fishermen tell me they no longer catch
The size of fish they once caught there.
They say that the fish processing plant
Used to attract very large fish,
But it doesn't anymore,
Because they now dispose of the carcasses elsewhere.
This factory was actually here at the time,
And one interesting difference, though, is that today,
The skeletons, the remains that aren't eaten by people,
They're sent away to make animal feed.
Back then, everything was put in the river —
Just right here, a matter of yards.
And it was chumming — this eddy you've got here.
And that inevitably would have created
A concentration of fish here
Way in excess of what you've got today.
The waste from this fish-Processing plant
Turned obidos into a massive artificial feeding station,
Which likely attracted big predators from miles around
To feed in the deep, circulating waters
Off these docks.
It had to be the worst place on the amazon
For a boatful of people to go down.
I need to find out
What's in the water around the docks,
And i'm given special dispensation
To fish for one day.
Between dry season and flood,
The water level here rises more than 20 feet,
Concealing staircases and gangways
Beneath the surface.
There's a lot of structure, so fish like this kind of place.
It gives them plenty of opportunities for cover,
And the cargo handlers seem to think the same.
They've actually put lines down themselves.
There's one over there.
It's gonna be a bit snaggy, though.
But i'm gonna put a bait down and see what turns up.
But before i get the chance,
There's a take on one of the lines.
All right. This is before i'm even started.
It's an armor-Plated catfish.
And it's quite a meaty fish.
That's a very promising start.
If a fish this size is lurking right under the dock,
I can't imagine what else might be hiding in these waters.
But straightaway,
I get a gruesome reply from the other side of the dock.
As soon as the man started gutting and cleaning
His catch in the water,
Hordes of flesh eaters boldly rose from the depths
To feast on the kill.
So there's a candiru.
Not the tiny variety that swims up inside people...
But the candiru asu —
The ones that usually bore into dead flesh.
I've investigated this fish before.
What looked like bullet holes in a man's body...
Were bore holes from this fish.
They were eating his body from the inside out.
So this is what happens when you've got smell in the water.
This water here is murky. It's not clear.
And yet these fish in probably about 20 foot of water
Can just find that in no time at all.
Just purely from the chemicals
That are being released into the water —
The blood and fragrance of meat.
That speed of response surprises me.
I thought these creatures sought out
Soft, decomposing bodies to tear into,
But this fish was alive just minutes ago.
Oh!
This is a really horrible fish to handle.
It's very, very muscular and wriggly.
There's almost no eyes at all on this.
They don't find their way about by sight.
It's purely by smell.
And what they do is, they cut a circular lump out.
If these creatures respond so quickly
To fresh blood in the water,
What would they have made of hundreds of passengers,
Battered by untethered cargo...
And bleeding into the amazon...
As they tried to swim to shore?
And what else is down there
That might be responding to the same signals?
I don't have much time here,
But i think it's worth a change of plan.
I want to see what responds,
Not to fish blood and flesh, but mammal.
It's time to set a trap.
So, that's three bags of entrails.
Fairly bloody but quite fatty.
It's gonna give off quite a bit of odor.
All i'm gonna do —
I'm just gonna stick it down the water here
And see if anything comes along.
Leave that there.
See what happens.
To make the most of my time, i'm also deploying rod and line
To seek out more stealthy predators from the depths.
With nothing biting, i take a minute to check the trap.
Oh.
Here we go.
That's quite a disgusting haul.
My bloody, meaty bait has not disappointed me.
And the candiru asu are not alone.
There's another flesh eater in there with them —
A fish known as the water vulture —
The piracatinga.
It's a catfish, no scales.
Quite small eyes.
But what it has got, it's got these very long tentacles,
Which is some kind of clue
As to how it finds its way around,
Finds its food down there in the murky water.
It might be small, but these are present in very large numbers —
Much more numerous than piranhas, for example.
I've been told the wreck was full
Of these gruesome flesh eaters
When it was raised from depths...
And they were still feeding on the bodies.
The teeth are very small, but it's actually got
A very strong bite for a fish this size,
So it can easily tear off — oh! — lumps of flesh.
Although they normally feed on dead creatures,
In a situation where
There's maybe lots of bodies in the water,
Some of them might be alive but actually injured...
I don't know if these are gonna think twice necessarily
Before they actually get into a wound and start feeding.
But however large the horde and horrific the attack,
I'm not sure that even thousands
Of these little mouths operating alone
Could be responsible
For so many people disappearing so quickly.
Could there have been another player that tipped the balance?
Before i can return to my line,
I'm approached by a dock supervisor,
Joal pamos, who tells me
About a recent attack on some men
Who went swimming in the river.
There were four of them,
And one of them suddenly got into difficulties.
He was shouting, calling for help.
And there was somebody in a boat nearby,
And he managed to get across to him and hang on to him.
And there was something holding on to his leg.
And the guy in the boat was pulling...
And he actually saw a fish...
Swallowing the person's foot almost up to the knee.
The fish eventually let go.
But apparently the man's leg was a bit of a mess.
He actually managed to see this fish
Closely enough to recognize it,
And it's a large catfish with a big mouth.
And it was dragging this guy under the water.
I've encountered the three biggest catfish
In the amazon before — the piraiba...
The jau...
And the redtail.
I've already discounted the piraiba
Because they're such solitary predators.
But could a concentration of another big catfish
Have wreaked the carnage of the docks?
Primed with this new information
And the vision of a large, meat-Eating catfish
On the end of my line,
I lower a fresh bait deep into the submerged structure.
I just have to hope i can catch one
Before my 24 hours at the docks are up.
In other situations, i could put the rod down
And just listen for a click of the reel.
But here —
Oh, this is something going.
I'm scouring the depths of the amazon
For a horde of large catfish that may have been tearing
Into the survivors of a boat disaster.
In the docks where it all happened,
I've got a very strong fish on the end of my line.
Oh, this is something going.
Oh!
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chu.
Right.
I think — i think the hook came out.
What i was gonna say was that i can't afford
To let anything have even a few inches,
'cause it's gonna wrap — wrap me around something.
In hindsight now, i'm thinking
I should have let that fish have a little more line,
But i don't know.
You do that here,
And it's just wrapped you around some of the structure.
That felt like quite a good fish.
The only way i'll uncover its identity
Is to get a fresh bait straight back down there.
But the countless underwater snags...
Are consuming my gear.
This place is basically eating terminal tackle.
It's just eating its way through my tackle box.
I'm just losing so much gear.
Fishing at the attack site has concealed
More than it's revealed.
And that's just one of the hazards
Of fishing a place like this.
There's just so much stuff on the bottom.
My 24 hours at the docks are up,
And i don't have anything to show for it...
Except for the information about the catfish attack.
If jau or redtails are contenders,
Surely someone in the town would know about them.
I track down a man who was head of the cargo handlers
In the early '80s and who remembers
What was living in the water back then.
Back at the time when the accident happened,
There were a lot more fish in the river,
And also bigger fish, as well.
What's happened since then —
The reason the numbers have decreased
And also the sizes of fish,
Is because there's been a lot more fishing activity.
And, also, people these days eat catfish.
In the old days, they didn't.
It was thought to be unlucky or even dangerous
To eat catfish, so these predators thrived.
Back then, because of the large fish,
People were afraid to bathe in the river.
There are stories of women going there with their children,
Children disappearing.
People putting this down to fish in the water.
They were in no doubt that catfish were to blame.
And even today, that fear persists —
What might be in the deep water — and...
You don't see very many people
Bathing by the riverside there.
So i have new contenders in my sights,
But there's no way i can investigate
These heavyweight catfish here and now in obidos.
A lot has happened in 30 years.
Here on the main river, people eat all manner of catfish.
That and the increase in commercial fishing
Generally means i simply won't find the evidence
I need here now.
Instead, i need to find some some corner of the amazon
That's in the same state now
That the main river was in then.
So what i really need to do is to travel
To a more remote part of the river system,
Relatively untouched by progress,
Where the fish might be present in the size and numbers
That they once were here.
And from that, i might get some insight
Into what part they played on that night.
But that's not going to be easy.
To outrun the huge reach
Of thousands of commercial fishing boats,
I have to literally go beyond the limits.
I'm told i must travel more than 750 miles upstream
To the mouth of a little-Known tributary
Called the padauari, which snakes its way north
Towards the border with venezuela.
This river's waters flow down past obidos,
But at this extreme distance, they're rarely fished.
For me, this will be completely uncharted territory.
I've examined all the other serious contenders
And eliminated them one by one.
I'm staking everything on the chance that out here,
I'll find the heavyweight catfish i'm after...
And that i'll be able to prove
It fits the profile of the super-Assassin
That wiped out so many passengers so quickly
On just one night.
I'll need to deploy tackle that can deal
With their extraordinary pulling power.
That means a line with 150 pounds breaking strain,
Tough fluorocarbon to cope with submerged trees and rocks,
And a steel leader that can withstand piranha teeth.
And to top it all, a serious hook.
This is a pattern i've actually used
For shark fishing in the past.
This is what's known as a circle hook —
That point actually points towards the shank.
It forms a rough circle.
You actually fish in a slightly different way.
You just gauge the reel, let the line tighten.
It's only when it reaches the lip you have proper contact.
So most of the fish are hooked very nicely in the lip,
Where it's quite easy to get the hook out.
Which is just as well when the creature i'm after
Stands accused of engulfing human limbs.
That's piranha.
It's history repeating itself.
Once again, piranhas are stripping my bait.
But these bites feel unusually aggressive.
These piranhas have the feel of quite big piranhas.
A couple of times, they've taken out a couple of foot of line.
I could move on, but my instinct tells me
I should get a closer look at one of these bait thieves.
My circle hook isn't going to catch them.
Even a big piranha won't get that entirely in.
I'm gonna change for a "j" hook.
And what that means is the next time
They start bothering the bait, i'm gonna strike.
Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Yeah.
Feels sizable.
I'm heading up a remote tributary of the amazon
On the hunt for heavyweight catfish
That i suspect had the pulling power
To drag struggling survivors escaping from a boat disaster
To the river's depths.
But my attempts are being thwarted...
By an aggressive predator
Hiding in the river's dark waters.
Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Yeah.
The strike feels like a piranha
But 10 times the size of the ones i've caught downstream.
Nice. That's what's been eating my bait.
That's a really big black piranha.
Just the size of that head.
The power of those jaws.
A piranha this size could do some serious damage.
It dwarfs the redbellies i've caught before.
So, could a swarm of these beasts be to blame?
Luckily, they're not normally found in the concentrations
That you find the small redbelly piranhas.
And the other thing is, actually,
These are very rare in the main river,
So i'm pretty certain
That it wasn't involved in the events of that night.
It's 17 long, and then 19-Inch girth.
And at more than 61/2 pounds,
This is the largest piranha i've ever caught.
If my finger would have been in the way there,
I'd be minus a finger.
If piranhas this size
Are at the smaller end of the food chain here,
I'm seriously wondering what's at the other end of it.
I'll have to keep fishing to find out
What tipped the balance of survival
Against the passengers of the sobral santos.
For days, i've followed the relentless coils
Of this serpentine river northwards,
Towards the remote border with venezuela.
I might see the fish in a second.
Finally, a flash of fin at the surface
Shows i'm dead on target.
This is the pirarara...
More commonly known as the amazon redtail catfish.
Its guarani name comes from the word for "fish" — "pir" —
And the word for "parrot" — "arara,"
Because the fish's fins
Look like the plumage of the scarlet macaw.
Out the water, they grunt.
But also they make this squeaking noise.
It's a piece of bone clicking against another piece of bone.
And i can only imagine that
That is actually for communication underwater.
Normally these things live in pretty low-Vis conditions,
Hence the feelers.
But this gives them another channel of communication
To operate on.
Next to its color, the redtail's
Most striking feature is its enormous head —
Around a third of its total body length.
Wide mouth.
Very capacious mouth cavity.
Lots of little teeth that form these sort of sandpapery pads.
So one here. One on the lower jaw.
It's very good for gripping prey, anything they get hold of.
I wish you could see my finger. It's sort of rasped.
Rasped my finger there.
But i still have too many unanswered questions
To condemn the redtail just yet.
If these predators were involved,
Exactly what role did they play?
I know they can grow to a size
Where they could easily engulf half a human leg,
And i felt more than enough power
To pull someone under.
But how could these expert grippers account
For all the mutilated bodies
And so many passengers disappearing
In the middle of the night?
Up until now, i haven't dared fish here after dark.
My location is so remote that if anything ever happened,
An emergency evacuation at night would be impossible.
But despite the risk of capsizing into water
Home to caimans and other nocturnal predators,
I have to find out.
Well, something bumping on there.
It's woken up, all of a sudden.
There's the proof that pirarara are active at night.
The fact that they've got those feelers
Means they can operate and feed with no trouble at all.
And quite a decent size, as well.
This one is four pounds heavier than the last.
The case against this particular suspect is building,
But if redtails did pull passengers
From the surface that night...
What is it about the way they operate
That wiped out so many people so quickly
So near the shore?
The only way to find out is to keep fishing
To see if there's anything in their behavior
That could reveal an answer to this mystery.
Yeah.
I haul in one redtail after another.
Oh!
But in order to bring the fish in...
I have to take them on in an underwater battleground
Booby-Trapped with snags
That's repeatedly destroying my gear.
Oh!
Look at that.
It's just cut on some sharp bit of wood down there.
As the fish come in, i'm building up a picture
Of what's going on under the water.
And it seems that they very much like proximity to snags.
Well, not just proximity.
They like being right in these swollen trees.
Oh
I could feel it grating on a branch down there.
So that's basically cut on a branch.
But fishing these nightmarish snags
Has revealed the answer i'm after.
Whenever a redtail takes the bait,
It makes a dash for cover right into the heart of the snags.
I've had a couple of runs, which,
Just as i've been getting ready to tighten...
It stopped.
And it looks like a fish
That's maybe picked up the bait and dropped it.
And this says something about the catfish behavior,
Which is grabbing food and then running off with it.
When i go to reel in, i find it hasn't let go.
It's just gone to ground.
It's a bit like a dog running for its basket with a bone.
But in certain circumstances,
This behavior can have lethal consequences.
Catfish clamped on something swimming.
If it is somebody's foot with toes on wiggling around
And the fish grabs hold of it...
It's gonna drag the whole thing with it.
The entire person is gonna come with the catfish.
Okay, it might eventually let go.
But in that time, that could make the difference
Between staying above the surface and drowning.
And once the victim's under the water,
The amazon's sharp-Toothed predators and scavengers
Can move in to finish the job.
To be sure of my theory, i need to bring up a beast
That's clearly capable of engulfing a limb.
I have to attempt one more catch
With what's left of my tackle.
I might be about to get more than i bargained for.
Oh, yeah.
It's a good-Sized fish.
In a river full of monsters,
I think i'm closing in on the unlikely catalyst
That turned a tragic shipwreck into an apocalyptic bloodbath.
Oh, yeah.
It's a good-Sized fish.
Just keep well clear of the line.
The beast isn't a heavyweight redtail
But a 100-Pound-Plus piraiba.
This goes to show that these pristine waters
Aren't patrolled by just one type
Of giant predatory catfish, but two,
And both were found at obidos.
But there's a problem.
The hook has been taken deep inside the mouth,
And i need to take it out.
I'm gonna shove my hand in to get the hook out.
It's gonna give me a bite.
It's bitten my arm.
But this extreme opportunity
To feel the bite of a big catfish
Gives me the last piece of evidence i need.
Piraiba are in the same family as redtails,
And they have virtually identical rasping pads
In their mouths.
These give them a grip that prevents
Slippery, struggling prey from escaping —
A grip far superior to human hands...
And a grip that i now know would have no problem
Holding struggling prey in the dark waters of obidos
The night the boat went down.
30 years ago, at obidos, they used to chum the water
With remains from the fish-Processing plant.
I believe these exceptional conditions
Could have attracted the usually solitary piraiba
In greater numbers than normal, and they were far from alone.
There were also hordes of over-Sized redtails.
And these were fish used to grabbing morsels in the water.
A bloody foot or somebody's arm —
Quite conceivable they'd grab them,
Thinking it's an edible morsel.
And if you think how little it takes
To make the difference
Between keeping your head above water and going under,
It's very little.
A fish the size of that
Or even half the size of that gets a good grip on part of you
And decides to go...
You're not gonna have much chance.
My gamble to pursue my quest
To this remote tributary has paid off.
I now have little doubt that
That amazon's heavyweight catfish
Played a pivotal role in the disaster,
And what they started
Was finished by their deadly accomplices.
Back at obidos, the final pieces of the puzzle
Fall into place.
So, are we any closer to understanding
What happened to those passengers
Who were unaccounted for at the time,
The ones who went below the surface and never reappeared?
And what was responsible for all all the body parts
Floating in the river the next day?
No single element causes a disaster of this scale.
This catastrophe arose
From an extraordinary convergence
Of conditions and participants on one horrific night.
The mix might have included a few rare giants
That could have easily torn victims limb from limb
And certainly a multitude of creatures
At the other end of the size scale
Capable of mass carnage.
There is no doubt that there were very large numbers
Of small carnivores.
Flesh eaters drawn in by the thousands
By the scent of bleeding passengers
And primed to tear into and dismember
The bodies of both living and dead.
And come daylight, scavenging piranhas
Would have moved in to clean up what was left.
From what i've seen,
I think the devastation of this feeding frenzy
Was only made possible
Because something first pulled the victims under —
Large redtails aided and abetted by piraiba.
Both have the grip...
The power...
And the instinct to bolt.
And 30 years ago,
The pitch-Black waters of obidos were alive with them,
Perhaps super-Sized on fish waste
Dumped in the river right here,
Where the sobral santos went down.
It was the perfect storm that delivered weakened prey
To hordes of hungry flesh eaters.
And if 30 years ago you were in a boat
Traveling up the amazon,
Home to some of the world's most notorious river monsters,
The last place you would want it to sink...
Would be here.
To watch more video of the most terrifying monsters
And see behind the scenes,
Go to animalplanet.Com/rivermonsters.