Jeremy Wade confronts ‘monsters’ of the murky deep for your entertainment

Sitting in a swimming pool full of piranhas, Jeremy Wade began to suspect his television crew was out for revenge.

First, a producer said the shot would not do by itself, they needed Wade to deliver a few lines. With dozens of piranhas swimming around him, the crew conducted a brief meeting to write a script.

Wade read it, but the sound man deemed it unsatisfactory because of background noise. Now in the pool 30 minutes, the razor-toothed flesh-eating fish were “getting a little more bold,” Wade recounts.

As host of River Monsters, a remarkable show on which Wade investigates claims of man-eating freshwater fish, Wade lives a fishing adventure as a career – while his crew of avid fishermen watch enviously.

Noticing the piranhas beginning to swim behind his back, Wade wondered whether their envy was behind his precarious position, “a little bit of revenge?” as he put it.

Thankfully, he survived the piranha pool. But in South America he brought to the screen survivors from a bus that plunged into the Amazon. When it was finally removed from the water, its occupants were missing most of their flesh.

Wade also found the family of a toddler who slipped into the river during dry season. The family rushed towards the water at the sound of the splash but found it was too late – piranhas were already devouring the child.

All in a day’s work for Wade, a young 54. Besides piranhas, he’s caught human-sucking catfish on the border between India and Nepal. He landed a 400-pound freshwater stingray with a 10-inch barb that delivers a flesh-dissolving, “wish you were dead” sting. And he hooked a vicious, toothy Bull Shark on a river, far inland, in Australia.

But Wade told The Daily Caller the fish he is personally most terrified by is the Goliath Tigerfish, the only fish in Africa unafraid of crocodiles. In fact, it eats them.

Wade said skinny dipping in the Congo River basin, where the fish thrive, is ill advised. “They’re partial to coming along and removing anything that dangles,” he said, adding that he’d require a “Kevlar bathing suit” to go swimming there.

Goliath Tigerfish have sharp, massive teeth that protrude on the outside of their mouths like something from your worst nightmare as a kid. Wade said he’s so fearful of the fish because they tend to attack humans unpredictably.

“If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, if one did happen to be lurking, it could take a very big lump out of you in no time.”

Some of the fish Wade investigates are decidedly less terrifying, even if the ominous soundtrack and voiceovers may fool viewers. For instance, watching an episode on the Snakehead, a nasty invasive species whose voracious eating habits are helping it spread through Florida, one might have thought the fish was threatening mankind’s extinction.

The fish is more of an ecological disaster than a maneater. But on River Monsters, a government official’s hyperbolic warnings are played repeatedly to a terrifying score. I wondered if Wade might laugh at it in private.

“I think some of it is a bit tongue in cheek,” Wade admitted, “we start off with a story, maybe hearing something that sounds a bit far fetched.” Cue the dramatization – which can reach comedy in its urgency. “But then we investigate – separate the factual from the unfactual – like a crime investigation,” Wade said.