I'm jeremy wade...
Fish on!
Biologist and underwater detective.
Her body was eventually found.
The attacker's identity unknown.
In seas and rivers around the world,
I've gotten hands-On...
Aah!
With some of the planet's most nightmarish creatures...
Beasts that have often been blamed for mysterious deaths.
But this time, it's different.
In a forest as old as the dinosaurs,
I'm on a mission to hunt down a monster from my past
In a place i've never been.
My target is a freshwater giant with a gruesome rap sheet.
This is a very serious injury.
And i'm not letting up till i've settled an old score.
It's fish, it's fish.
And it brought a cow... Yeah.
It brought a cow into the water.
Here we go, here we go.
— captions by vitac — www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
From a remote lake in malaysia, southeast asia,
Comes a disturbing report of a double tragedy.
The sun is out and the water is calm,
But something isn't right.
When the empty boat is eventually spotted,
No one can find any sign of its missing owner.
A dive team is called in,
Fully equipped to scour the depths.
Within hours, though,
One of the search party has also vanished.
It takes another day to locate both victims.
In each case,
The simple explanation is accidental drowning.
But this is where things get interesting.
Almost immediately, people start blaming
The two deaths on a creature that lives in the lake.
Previous strange sightings of something
That produces bubbles at the surface
Suggest to some at least that what happened was no accident.
Even more surprising, though,
Is the proposed identity of the killer.
Arapaima are not native to malaysia.
They're a predatory fish from south america.
Yet according to this report,
One of them could have ended up in the lake
After it was released
As an unwanted pet many years ago.
The idea of a deadly arapaima is certainly intriguing.
I know from painful experience that this fish
Can blast out of the water like a missile.
Ah!
A big one could potentially knock a man out of a boat
Or ram a diver.
On the other hand, descriptions of
The supposed arapaima are pretty sketchy,
Ranging from dark brown to silver in color,
And anything from 4 feet to 15 feet in length.
Then there's this internet photo
Claiming to show the captured beast.
Sitting here thousands of miles away,
It's hard to to judge it, but i have to say i'm skeptical.
So is that really a rogue arapaima on the loose?
And if so, did it have anything to do with the two deaths?
I think there could be more to this mystery than meets the eye,
So i'm heading to the scene of the tragedy.
Created some 30 years ago to provide hydropower,
Malaysia's lake kenyir is said to be deeper than loch ness.
Entombed within it are the remains of 13 flooded villages.
I often get vital clues from villagers,
But out here,
There doesn't appear to be a living soul.
One really odd thing about this lake
Is just how few people there are.
Apart from a few scattered tourist attractions,
It's pretty well deserted,
And even these modern resorts look as if
They've almost been left to the jungle.
It's really — it's really quite spooky.
In their native amazon,
Arapaimas stick to shallow lakes and slow-Moving rivers,
So my immediate instinct is to check out the quiet backwaters.
Just like the day when the men went missing,
The lake is dead calm.
I'm itching to interrogate it the way i know best.
Arapaima give themselves away when they surface to gulp air.
But for several hours, there isn't so much as a ripple.
Have i perhaps bitten off more than i can chew?
With hundreds of islands and hidden coves,
Kenyir is more labyrinth than lake.
Searching it thoroughly could take a lifetime,
But my boat driver, arman,
Reckons he knows someone who might have a lead.
Khairul abu bakar is a wildlife guide
Who spent 10 years recording everything
That lives in and around the lake.
Wow.
Tiger! Tiger.
Are there many tigers here?
Uh, i think so,
Because we found lot of footprints.
To me, i mean, this — who are they?
They live in the forest?
They don't live in the towns and the villages?
No, stay in the forest,
But they migrate from the one place
To one place looking for food.
I'm intrigued by these batek,
But it's a big fish i need to focus on.
I'm wondering about what's under the water.
Have you ever seen an arapaima?
I heard rumors about arapaima a few years ago,
But i never seen it.
So all the time you spent in the water, you've never —
Yeah, just heard the story, but i never seen it.
What khairul tells me next, however,
Completely blows open my investigation.
When i was young, we go to picnic.
We saw a group of cows go to the edge of the water
And get some drink, and suddenly,
Something big like a crocodile
Come up from the water and catch the baby cow
And pull it into the water.
But it's not crocodile.
You don't have any crocodile? No crocodile.
No crocodiles here? No crocodile.
So you're telling me it's a fish.
It's fish, it's fish.
And it pulled a cow — it's big fish.
It pulled a cow into the water?
Mm-Hmm. Your whole family saw it?
Yeah.
Do they have — do you have any idea what it was?
Uh, we call it a tapah.
Tapah? Tapah.
It's very big fish.
The tapah is the only fish that's every beaten me.
In india, where human limbs have been found in its stomach,
It's known as the sareng.
Many hindus regard it as sacred and say you must leave it alone.
It's still there, i can feel it.
It's off, it's off, it's off.
Perhaps i should have listened.
The more i tried to catch it, the more i seemed to be cursed.
Oh!
Right to the bitter end, i was left empty-Handed.
That could be the net result of my return to india —
A broken line.
Capable of growing as long as a man,
The tapah is malaysia's biggest freshwater fish.
Unusually for a catfish, it's known to gulp air,
And despite its size, it's surprisingly agile.
After khairul's story,
I'm wondering if the tapah could be the culprit.
Like the arapaima, the tapah is carnivorous,
And it too can launch itself out of the water.
But which, if either, of these two predators,
Arapaima or tapah, is actually stalking this lake?
Something on here.
A double tragedy on malaysia's lake kenyir
Has stirred up speculation about a giant fish,
And i'm on the trail of two possible culprits.
Rumor has it that a south american fish
Called an arapaima is on the loose
On the wrong side of the world.
But maybe the mysterious lake monster is a native tapah,
The only fish that's ever defeated me.
Something on here.
I'm just going to swing it in the boat.
I've hooked a third predator for my list.
Quite a feisty thing.
What it lacks in size,
A snakehead more than makes up for with aggression.
Those teeth are — they're like daggers, really.
They are capable of actually sawing pieces of flesh
Out of another fish.
It's a bit like the teeth on a saw blade.
If they shake the head side to side like that,
They can actually rip a piece of flesh out.
Very aggressive when it comes to protecting their young.
They've even been known to go for people.
But despite its attitude,
This fish is not one of my suspects.
Although it's called the giant snakehead,
These grow to a maximum size
Of about 40 pounds, something like that,
And, at that size, there's no way that a snakehead
Could jump out of the water and pull somebody from the boat.
It's encouraging to have caught something,
But i'm no closer to finding the alleged lake monster.
Any kind of lead would be welcome.
I'm hoping that whoever lives in this floating houseboat
Might have some information.
The owner is a fisherman named moksan,
Who tells me he's lived here since the lake was created.
Did you ever see anything strange in the water?
People say that there's arapaima here.
You ever seen arapaima?
Like khairul,
He's heard the rumors about an arapaima,
But hasn't seen it himself.
He says that even though there's a large bounty on its head,
No one has ever cashed in.
Another fish i'm interested in is the tapah.
Have you ever seen or heard stories about them
Taking fish or animals from the surface of the water?
Before the valleys here were flooded,
There were apparently many tapah in the rivers.
Moksan recounts stories of them grabbing dogs
And wild pigs.
But it sounds like the lake could also be harboring
A very different kind of killer,
And this one is no fish.
Wow. We were just talking about tapah
Attacking things on the surface,
And he's just said to me,
"what you've got to worry about here is something else."
And at first i thought he was talking about a whirlpool.
Apparently it's not a whirlpool, the water isn't turning.
It actually bubbles up, and it starts fairly small,
But it spreads to cover an area about 40 feet across.
That's actually wider than the width of this boat here.
And he says you get sediment and air
And all sorts coming up from the bottom.
Certain deep lakes are known to belch deadly gases.
He says it's very scary, it's very spooky.
Particularly if you're on a small boat,
You don't want to be anywhere near it.
Could this strange phenomenon explain the missing boatmen?
One thing that's becoming clear to me is that this lake
Is even more mysterious than i thought it was.
Moksan's warning has put me on edge.
The more i get to know this place,
The more sinister it feels.
But maybe, at last, i'm about to get a breakthrough.
Tipped off about my investigation,
A witness has come forward, someone who claims to have seen
And photographed the elusive lake monster.
Two mysterious deaths have drawn me
To malaysia's lake kenyir,
Where my suspect list is growing.
There are rumors of a rogue arapaima,
But so far, i've failed to find a witness.
Now i've been contacted by a man who claims to have seen
And photographed this lake phantom.
All i know about him is that he's a fisherman
Who goes by the name of matt rambo.
Hello?
Hello. Hello, are you matt?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello, then.
I'm jeremy.
You saw the arapaima in the lake?
Can you tell me exactly how that happened?
One evening, he was out fishing on the lake.
He was in his boat, it was just him in the boat.
He saw this fish about six foot down in the water,
And the thing is, the boat was approaching it.
Yeah.
Ah, so you surprised it? The fish is there.
The boat comes and it goes away.
He says it was pale gray and about six feet long,
Which does fit with an arapaima.
But his story comes with a twist.
So you had it on your phone?
But since then, the phone has fallen in the lake.
He'd heard the stories about arapaima,
So he says he's absolutely sure it was arapaima.
He did get a picture on the phone.
He says it wasn't that clear,
But you could identify it from it.
Since then, unfortunately,
He's dropped the phone in the lake,
So the lake has taken back the evidence of this sighting.
But he's certain that it was an arapaima.
Arapaima or not,
At least i now have a possible location.
And i'm curious to revisit the one photo that does exist,
The photo that was posted online.
The key detail for me is the soil here,
The color of it.
If you look at anywhere on the lake here,
It's this sort of reddy-Orange color,
Whereas here it's almost white or gray.
Then there is this house in the background.
That doesn't look like any of the buildings
I've seen on the lake here, so although this is
A genuine picture of a big arapaima,
I am pretty certain that it wasn't taken here.
If some kind of creature really is to blame for what happened,
Then i'm almost certain that it's not the fish
Everyone's been talking about.
It is possible that somewhere on this lake
There is an escaped arapaima on the loose.
But even if there is, do i believe that it
Could've knocked somebody out of a boat
And rammed a diver?
There are two very specific circumstances
When arapaima will go for people.
The first one is when you've got one cornered in a net.
The second circumstance is when the arapaima
Are defending their nests.
Now, here, nobody tries to net arapaima,
And in order to have a nest, you have to have two individuals
Which find each other somehow and form a breeding pair.
Which brings me to the biggest factor, really,
Which is just the math.
In order to fall foul of an arapaima on this huge lake,
It would be an absolute million-To-One freak accident.
I don't think an arapaima can be the culprit.
And that leaves me to focus on my second suspect.
The only river moster that's ever eluded me.
Tapah can certainly grow big.
But do they deliberately attack people?
The grisly human remains reported from their stomachs
In india could just have been scavenged from the dead.
Before i can accuse this fish,
I'm going to need proof of intent.
Prompted by stories of aggressive tapah
In another part of malaysia,
I'm heading to sarawak, on the island of borneo.
Tapah also live here,
Not in empty backwaters,
But in busy rivers where people live,
Work, and play.
In the village of pandan, i'm told that many parents
Keep their children out of the water
For fear of them being snatched by one of these fish.
So this river, this river, the big river.
A few inquiries lead me to a man named madahi,
Who still remembers the day someone was attacked
Right in front of his house.
So this was a young boy, three, four years old.
He was with his mother and father on a platform.
Both parents are busy with their daily chores.
They don't let kids here bathe on their own.
They're always sort of supervised to some extent.
Madahi describes bubbles at the surface.
This is a key detail for me, since tapah are thought
To control their buoyancy by gulping and then releasing air.
There's a splash.
Something's grabbed him by the leg.
The boy could easily have vanished.
But his quick-Thinking father pulls him to safety.
If he hadn't done that,
The child could well have disappeared.
And this definitely wasn't a crocodile?
No.
So this was — this was a fish.
This was ikan tapah?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, ikan tapah.
There were marks on his leg.
This was a fish that they estimate would've been 60,
70 pounds in weight or something,
And this happened just a couple of hundred yards
Down the river from here.
Madahi's account adds to other reports from along this river
Of a fish that attacks ducks, dogs, and even boat propellers.
But what i discover next is in a different league.
I'm in malaysia
On the trail of a freshwater giant
That could be responsible for two mysterious deaths.
The tapah is a fish that's cut through my line before.
Oh!
It's off, it's off, it's off.
And i'm determined not to let it get away a second time.
On a busy river in borneo,
I've already heard stories of tapah attacking boat propellers
And even children.
Now i'm trying to find out if it's bold enough
To target a full-Grown person.
People say that you have a story about somebody in the water.
Niah leng, a village elder, tells me that with this fish,
Even adults are fair game.
In the incident he recounts,
The victim is in water up to his chest.
This was actually a man bathing in the river here,
Completely naked.
Mm-Hmm.
And a tapah bit him in the groin.
This is a real step up. This is something more serious.
With nothing to protect his skin,
What happened, he actually had one testicle removed.
This is... A very serious injury.
Though the man survived,
It seems that a big tapah will go for pretty much anything.
Even if it occasionally ends up with more than it can swallow.
The tapah now is my prime suspect,
But i know from bitter experience
That catching it won't be easy.
In theory, a lure that mimics a small fish
Should trigger a predatory response.
And by towing it behind the boat,
I can cover large stretches of river.
But the hours slip by without a take.
I'm starting to wonder if i might have gotten here too late.
This river is the first place where i've heard stories
Of tapah actually going for people,
So it's clearly a fish with attitude.
But what's equally clear traveling along the river
Is the sheer amount of fishing pressure.
Everywhere you look, there's lines
Going into the water, there's nets,
So the question facing me is whether the big ones
Are still actually here.
Sticking around on this heavily fished river feels futile.
But where on earth do i go next?
The tapah is the only fish that's ever defeated me,
And to put that right, i'm ready to take a gamble.
They are the batek tribe.
Doubling back, i return to the mainland,
Where i've obtained special permission
To visit a tribe of hunter-Gatherers
Who live deep in the forest of taman negara.
The batek, i've discovered, do hunt fish.
I'm hoping they'll know about the tapah
And where i can find one.
But i've no idea if they'll welcome an outsider.
In the heart of the malay peninsula,
I'm about to meet an isolated tribe of hunter-Gatherers.
This is jeremy. Hello.
Jeremy. Jeremy.
The batek are a remnant population
With ancient african roots.
At kampung ao, they seem friendly enough,
And our conversation soon turns to the tapah.
So it's a very long fish, a big one,
Could be the length of this table sometimes?
Before long, my guide roslan and i
Are hearing all kinds of hair-Raising firsthand accounts.
So you were chased, but it didn't eat you.
So this is not a log or a tree?
Something hit the boat.
It's easy to warm to these fellow fisherman,
Who are positively eager to share their knowledge.
If i want to catch one, can you suggest a good river?
I'm soon cramming my notebook with suggestions,
And by all accounts, i've come to the right place.
They're definitely talking a big fish,
An aggressive fish, one that they respect,
So if i want to catch one, they say, "strong tackle.
Get off the main river, go up a side tributary."
Taking the bateks' advice, i head deeper into the forest.
The water looks perfect for fishing,
But i know this can change quickly if it rains heavily.
According to roslan,
A tapah likes nothing better than live meat.
It's about three foot.
He tells me he once saw a big one grab a monkey
Off an overhanging branch.
So the tapah came right out?
Came right out, did like that,
Just disappeared.
And you saw that? I saw that.
The boatman, meanwhile, says he's seen a tapah
Trying to swallow a still-Thrashing
Six-Foot monitor lizard.
How big was this tapah?
60, 70 kilos, so about 150 pounds?
Yep.
By any measure, that's a big fish.
Roslan has come prepared.
Local legend has it that this small keli catfish
Is just what you need to rile a tapah.
It doesn't look very appetizing,
But there's a story, the locals say,
That the tapah is jealous of these
Rather luxuriant whiskers on the chin.
The tapah has rather pathetic ones.
They're very short like that.
So the tapah is jealous of this fish.
When it sees it, it makes it angry.
Sounds like the tapah has serious anger management issues.
Let's hope it works.
I decide to fish over a deep pocket in the river.
And within minutes,
Something powerful has hit the bait.
I'm going to swing it up onto the boat.
And...
Now.
We got a snakehead.
The float just vanished,
And i thought, "it's got to be a tapah."
I was using a large bait.
That engulfed a three-Pound catfish,
And it just reminds you that fish are not like us.
We cut things into bite-Size lumps and chew them.
Fish very often just swallow something whole.
A powerful, muscular fish.
And you can see why they call them snakehead.
That head is just like a snake's.
I'm pleased with that, very pleased with that.
I feel sort of warmed up, ready for a tapah now.
Clearly there are predators on the move.
But after a promising curtain-Raiser,
I'm failing to draw the main act out of the shadows.
It looks like i could be in for a long night.
Local fishermen like roslan simply tie their lines
To flexible branches and don't come back until dawn.
But that's not my style.
If i hook a tapah, i want to bring it in quickly,
Get a good look at it, then release it unharmed.
So i'm placing my baits carefully
On the edge of deep water
And then running the lines back to my rods on a small,
Clear space on the opposite bank.
Little bit. That's it, that's good.
Leave it there. What will happen is that
The weak line now will break and i'll be into a fish.
That's the theory, anyway.
This is the deepest pool in the deepest jungle.
I can almost smell them.
Maybe it's going to be tonight.
But as the night wears on, i'm tortured by bad memories.
Daylight brings a mixed result.
Spent a whole night here, 12 hours,
With nothing taking either of the baits.
But roslan has just brought me this.
The messy, raking bite is as good as a calling card.
Definitely a tapah,
And that was close.
It shows very graphically what those teeth are capable of.
Almost certainly, the beast that mauled
Roslan's bait will now be too wary to bite again,
Which leaves me with no option but to move on.
Has the curse of this fish come back to haunt me?
This does all look like the beginnings of the monsoon,
And the thing is, if the monsoon really hits
And the rain starts dripping down,
The water starts coming up,
I've been told that is it as far as my fishing goes,
As far as my chances of a big tapah go,
So it's true to say that time is running out.
As i race to find a new fishing spot,
The monsoon launches its first big salvo.
After a huge storm, i'm worried that the rivers
Could swell and become unfishable,
Potentially in a matter of hours.
Setting up on the bank as before would eat precious time,
So i decide to moor up and fish from the boat.
All i can do now is wait and hope that the fishing gods
Will see fit to lift their curse.
I got a fish!
But there's work to do.
It's on a tree.
Let's go above it.
It's round a tree, i think.
Okay, keep in the middle.
Out in the middle, please.
It's coming up, it's coming up.
Right. Ready? Ready?
I'm ready.
Here we go, here we go, here we go.
It's clear, it's clear.
Lift. Lift, lift, lift, lift.
Now!
We have it. We have it.
Tapah. We have it.
Let's go to the bank.
At long last, my tapah curse has lifted.
All right, let's have a look at this beast.
Lengthwise, it just goes on and on.
This is a fish with eyes bigger than its stomach.
Dogs, huge lizards, a cow, and even humans.
I've heard enough about its feeding habits to know
That this is a beast that means business.
So what about the boatman and the diver on lake kenyir?
Did they in fact fall foul of a tapah?
The one thing that's actually bothering me is the teeth.
They're very sharp, they're very numerous.
If one of these jumped out of the water and grabbed you,
Your arm or your leg is going to look
Basically like hamburger meat.
And yet, neither of those corpses at lake kenyir
Had so much as a scratch.
For so long, this creature has been my nemesis,
But that doesn't make it guilty of homicide.
Maybe for once,
The real culprit isn't an animal.
But even if the two deaths on kenyir remain a mystery,
It hasn't all been in vain.
At long last, i've finally caught it.
The tapah is no longer the one that got away.