River Monsters (7 page)

As far as I’m aware, there is no accurate data on what different fish pull. So I’m resorting to educated guesswork here that is based on what line strengths are necessary for
‘hit and hold’ fishing in still water. Going on this, I estimate that, from a standing start, most fish can pull between one-third and half of their weight. (The figure will be higher
if they already have some momentum and there will be some variation between species based on body shape, fin area, muscle volume, metabolic rate and so forth.) So to exert a pull of thirty pounds
– the force needed to pull me under or overpower me in water – a wels would need to weigh only sixty to ninety pounds. In other words, it could be half my size or even less.

Based on this, the fish that attacked the swimmers in Schlachtensee was borderline size: maybe capable of pulling a person under, or maybe not. If that was its intention, it would have to
‘suck it and see’. I spoke to two of the victims, Jonas Wegg and Katharina Saxe, and neither of them was pulled under, which suggests they both had a lucky escape from a fish that was
not quite big enough to pose a real danger. But bigger fish are in the lake, and neither of the victims goes swimming there any longer.

Something else they both said was very interesting. In the popular imagination, big fish live in the deepest water, but these attacks happened in the shallowest part of the lake, almost shallow
enough to stand up in. Also, although wels commonly feed in the shallows at night, the attacks happened in broad daylight. At first this would appear to give the wels an alibi, and indeed some
biologists have expressed doubt that the attacker was a wels, but there is one reason why wels would be in the shallows at that time of year.

Summer is when wels breed. But, unlike many other fish, they don’t just shed their eggs and abandon them. The male makes a hollow in the mud or weed, into which the female sheds her eggs.
The male then stays with the nest, fanning the fertilised eggs to keep them oxygenated, and defending them against intruders.

‘For this particular catfish it was a huge stress to guard the nest, when it had all those swimmers around,’ said Dr Christian Wolter, from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater
Ecology and Inland Fisheries, as we rowed a boat in the area where the bathers were bitten. This was the only shallow, weedy water in the lake, apart from the extreme margins. The fish didn’t
have anywhere else to breed. In his opinion, these incidents weren’t attacks but rather acts of self-defence. In other words, it is very similar behaviour to that shown by North American
channel, blue and flathead catfish, which typically nest in enclosed holes and will clamp down on the intruding hand or foot of a hand-fishing ‘noodler’. The main difference is that
these German swimmers had no idea they were trespassing and provoked this response unwittingly.

I’d come prepared to fish for something with a large, unsatisfied appetite. Even though this assumption now appeared wrong, to come all this way and not cast a line would have been equally
wrong. So I teamed up with a local angler called Horst, a retired butcher with a penchant for yodelling while he fished, and we spent an evening offering up half-pound crucian carp on the drop-off
into the deep hole at the lake’s top end. We didn’t catch anything, but even blank sessions teach you something. In this case it lent support to what local anglers said about the very
small number of wels here. This in turn chimed with what Dr Wolter said about the difficulty wels have breeding here. All of this seemed to add up. The Schlachtensee wels are not man-eaters, just
caring parents.

But what about those old stories of corpses and body parts? They come from a time, long gone, when wels were much more numerous and reported at massive sizes, so we’ll never know for sure
how big they grew or just how predatory they were. Or maybe we will. Because in a few places, the species is making a dramatic comeback. . . .

Nowhere today holds as many big wels as the Rio Ebro in northern Spain, where hundred-pounders are commonplace and an increasing number go over two hundred pounds. Wels are not native to the
Ebro but were introduced just thirty-five years ago in the mid-1970s. Their phenomenal success here can be attributed to three main factors. First, the water is much warmer than their native
rivers, so they feed and grow all year round with no shut-down period in winter. Second, they are aquatic golden geese. The local economy is now based on fishing tourism, so these fish are worth
more alive than dead, and the fishing is, almost exclusively, catch-and-release. Third, the river is stuffed with food: not just the carp that were here originally but also the tons –
literally – of high-protein bait that visiting anglers tip into the water. The Ebro was a place I had to check out.

Most catfish are omnivorous and are caught on baits such as worms, dead fish, and mussels on the bottom. But the big Ebro wels catfish are highly predatory. Until a few years ago, the preferred
bait was live carp or eel. The carp typically weighed around five pounds, but there are stories of people using twenty-pounders. To keep the bait in the desired spot, a few yards of
‘weak’ line, typically twenty pounds breaking strain, were attached to a swivel above the bait and then tied to a tree branch on the far bank or a large buoy anchored in the water. When
the angler tightened the line between the vertical rod and the anchor point, this would then suspend the bait just under the surface.

Wels find live prey by homing in on vibrations. Although fish ears have no opening to the outside or sound-gathering funnel like ours, catfish hearing is highly sensitive thanks to a series of
small bones linking the ears to the swim bladder. In this way they use this large buoyancy organ as an amplifier. In addition, they use their lateral line, the sunken canal down each side of the
body into which protrude jelly-covered hairs, which move and send nerve impulses in response to pressure changes in the water. So a fish tethered near the surface, even on the other side of the
river, is an unmissable target. In fact, their remote sensing is so acute that experiments have shown wels to be capable of tracking down small fish by following the wake they leave in the
water.

But live-baiting is now banned on the Ebro largely because fishermen were bringing in bait fish from outside, which carried the risk of spreading disease. Some would also argue that, in these
enlightened times, this method is questionable from an ethical standpoint. But if the wels’s predatory reflexes are all they’re cracked up to be, they ought to hit a lure. To test this
out, I spent an afternoon trolling in the ‘upper lake’, above the hydroelectric dam just upstream from the Ebro’s confluence with the Rio Segre.

I think it’s true to say that hardly anyone fishes moving baits for any kind of catfish, but such a near-total disregard of their predatory side smacks of preconception or even prejudice.
Wels are not sleek, streamlined fish like pike or salmon, and their sluglike looks suggest a nature that is equally sluggish. And although angling should be a lifelong lesson in open-mindedness,
anglers on the whole judge catfish by their looks. In my case, however, I had open-mindedness forced upon me. In 1982, while fishing a lake in India, I cast a shallow-diving plug at a large swirl
in a muddy bay and hooked a fish that, after an arm-wrenching fight, turned out to look disconcertingly like a wels. A closer look revealed a more silvery colouration and proper teeth, identifying
it as a mulley (
Wallagu attu
). It weighed around twenty pounds, and to prove it was no fluke, I caught three smaller ones later. Locals told me it grows to over one hundred pounds but then
added, to my lack of surprise, that such fish are an extreme rarity nowadays. Then, when I went to the Amazon, I caught surubim catfish (
Pseudoplatystoma fasciatum
) on plugs. These are
beautiful, firm-bodied fish with battleship-like grey-and-black Rorschach patterns on their flanks. To begin, this was ‘lucky dip’ fishing, trying all sorts of lures at all depths to
find out what species were down there. Over time, however, my approach became more targeted, and what worked best for surubim was a slow troll, with the rod wedged under one knee and over the other
leg as I slowly paddled.

So trolling for wels didn’t seem too incongruous. Using the sonar to read the bottom, we swam the deep-diving Luhr-Jensen Fingerling as close as we could to the rock tumbles and pinnacles
on the edge of the deep central valley. The first couple of times the rod kicked, it was zander, one a shiny, green, spiky-finned four-pounder. When the wels took, though, there was no doubting it,
and once we’d survived the first heart-stopping moments, when fish and boat were travelling in opposite directions, the light rod struggled to bring it up. In the end I confess I was slightly
disappointed that it wasn’t quite one hundred pounds, but a ninety-pounder is still a lunker on a lure. More important, though, was what it proved to me: that a hungry wels will hit a moving
target.

But that fish hit in an artificial lake, in still, clear water. To test their responses in more realistic conditions, I booked a small rowing boat and a local guide, Enrico, and put in a few
miles up the Rio Segre. Here the water was brown and bowling along in places at a fast trotting pace – hardly catfish water in most people’s minds. Bait was what Enrico called a
‘yummy fish’, six inches of soft, white plastic with a large single hook threaded through it. What followed was some of the most demanding and exhilarating fishing I’ve ever done.
As the tree-hung riverbank blurred by, the aim was to spot slacks and eddies on the edge of the current and land the lure in them, as close to the side as possible. The difference between a perfect
cast and a disastrous hang-up that breaks the line – because in this current, there’s no going back – is about three inches. It took me a while to get the hang of it, keeping my
feet as the boat spun and bumped down shallow rapids, while also scanning both banks – and all the time avoiding the camera boat without looking at it. At first I was cautious as I found my
range. Then I started getting in some good shots in some good places, but I had no takes.

Then I hit on the vital detail. On landing the lure in a bank-side pocket, I left the reel open a fraction longer, to let the lure sink, then tightened and twitched it alive. Bang! Something
plunged on the line as the boat kept barrelling downstream and the drag yelped. Instead of the expected loud crack, I heard the painful reedy sound of line scything through water as the fish was
dragged from its holt and started to follow us down. Then it was no longer there. It happened so quickly, this double dose of disbelief. I felt a certain sickness come over me – that aching
feeling of loss and not knowing. But I couldn’t dwell on it because I now knew what to do, and more lies were passing by.

Soon I was absorbed in renewed casting, and I hooked another fish. But that one got off too. Then there was the bridge ahead, where we would have to get out. I was bitterly disappointed and
tried to give myself some solace by blaming the borrowed gear: a combination of soft rod and thick wire hook. The fish didn’t feel huge, maybe fifty pounds, but what memorable catches they
would have been from water like this! You can keep your peacock bass, for all their brash Amazonian finery, which you fish for in the same general way but at one-tenth the speed for one-tenth the
rod-bending poundage. I told myself that one day I’d come back with a beefy bait-casting rod and multiplier reel and with my casting already sharpened so I could simply look at the spot and
the cast would go there, like a basketball clearing the ring. But in a way all of this was beside the point. As much as any scientific paper, those hook-ups confirmed that wels are supreme
predators, capable of detecting and seizing prey in turbulent zero visibility. What’s more, despite their reputation as bottom-feeders, they are very switched on to possible food from above,
which in fact is totally in keeping with their protruding lower jaw and upward-looking eyes. And to grab potential food this quickly, their reaction has to be an unthinking reflex: grab first, ask
questions later.

But if there’s easier food around, they’ll go for it. Like all animals, their behaviour is driven by constant biological accountancy, where the currency is energy. Why chase food if
it’s served up on a plate? Anglers on the Ebro also make a similar decision: why chase the fish if they will come to you? And, in a way, a deal is struck. Now, following the live-bait ban,
the most popular method is half a dozen walnut-sized fish-meal pellets offered on the bottom. Wels find bait on the riverbed by following chemical trails in the water, which they sniff out using
the taste buds that are spread all over their bodies. (Some say that a catfish is like a giant tongue.) These chemical receptors are most concentrated on the whiskers. Together with four short
whiskers on the chin, wels have two long ones on the upper jaw that they can extend to either side in front of them. This, we may suppose, makes their remote tasting strongly directional. They
probably home in on food by turning in the direction of the stronger reading.

Bottom-fishing for wels, Ebro style, bears more relation to marine beach fishing than to most freshwater fishing. Each rod is set in a vertical holder, and, using a small rowing boat, the bait
is deposited 100 to 150 yards away along with sixteen to twenty ounces of lead to anchor it and a bucketful of loose pellets to lure the ‘cats’ in. The line is zero-stretch braid with a
breaking strain of 150 pounds, and the reel is screwed up tight. A take is signalled by the rod folding over or springing back straight as the line falls slack. In either case, there’s a
tinkling of the bell clipped to the rod-tip. The little sound is insignificant, but after a couple of days it has everyone reflexively scrambling, kicking over cups of tea and falling over film
kit.

A flicked torch beam shows my rod is straight – a slack-liner. I grab it and wind up the slack. Yes, there’s a weight there that isn’t the lead, so I heave back as hard as I
can. ‘Try to pull its head off’, is the unsubtle advice of the guides here, but with all that line out, anything less will just bounce the hook feebly off its jaw. The next moment,
however, I’ve lost my balance and I’m being dragged on my backside towards the water. The only thing that stops me going in is a slab of rock that I hit with my feet. Some fishermen
here end up with their companions hanging round their waists, but at least I’m spared that indignity. To my right is a large weedbed. If the fish kites round this, I’ll never get it in,
so once I feel it coming my way, I can’t let up for a moment. There’s the sound of something breaking the surface, and at first all I see is its head – about a foot across. A hand
grips its lower jaw, and then another hand, very quickly, as it tries to twist. The movement is exactly like a crocodile’s ‘death roll’, and I can easily see now how this could
potentially drown a victim or rip a limb from a corpse. (While nobody normally tries to ‘noodle’ wels catfish, I have heard of two cases of American hand-fishers having a wrist broken
by a spinning blue catfish, which are smaller than wels. Another man, who swam headfirst into a nesting hole, was scalped.) With its mouth unclamped from grazed hands, we zip the fish into a nylon
body bag, and it takes three of us to drag it up on to the bank.