River Monsters hunts for underwater terror
SCIENCE TV: Discovery Channel host explores island’s coast for the hagfish, a slime-producer straight out of a horror film
For the most part Wade acts as a detective searching for the fish that’s often a big player in local lore.
“Every show we make we start with a fish story and end with a very real creature,” said Wade. “Very often it is something of a very impressive size and is something that a lot of viewers never knew existed.”
If you haven’t seen the show, you should, just to check out what the heck lives in waters (low visibility muddy waters especially) around the world. Even after a ton of episodes and stories from all corners of the world, Wade admits that he, like the rest of us, is fascinated by “predators and things that are out there that may be dangerous.”
And that he still gets a thrill from finding a loveseat-sized catfish with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth.
“There’s something about pulling a fish out of the river that is bigger than you that makes you question your place on the food chain,” said Wade. “That’s always a bit of a moment.”
No kidding. and they produce copious amounts of slime. So when you handle them, it is a somewhat unpleasant experience. But quite interesting.”
It’s things like that that please the biologist in Wade. Then there’s the big white sturgeon that makes the angler in the Suffolk, England, native a happy camper. “I got one that cleared a 100 pounds, but as sturgeon go on the Fraser they can go a lot bigger than that,” said Wade, adding that he’d have liked to have had more than a couple of days on the mighty Fraser.
“I had one that got away that might have been bigger than that. It’s one of those things that sits in your mind and makes you think, ‘Yup, I need to go back sometime.’ ”
River Monsters is a popular show and proof positive that people do indeed love a fish story, and Wade and the gang certainly provide those.
Usually a man after big fish, River Monsters host Jeremy Wade had other plans when he visited B.C. back in September 2014 to shoot the special River Monsters: Prehistoric Terror.
“You know, being our prehistoric program, we were looking for primitive and weird,” Wade said recently while shooting a new episode for Season 8 of the Discovery Channel show based just outside Seattle.
The two-hour special, which airs on Discovery at 11 p.m. on May 25, takes Wade and his crew from one end of the globe to another, including trips to Bamfield on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island and then up the Fraser River and into the Fraser Canyon and Hells Gate.
The Island adventure was all about the search for hagfish and ratfish.
“You now, I quite like handling fish, but I would make an exception for hagfish,” said Wade. “They are these sort of squirmy things that live down on the bottom and tend to eat dead fish from the inside out