Called “the greatest angling explorer of his generation” (Independent on Sunday), Jeremy Wade takes viewers where no wildlife program has gone before. Now Wade goes truly beneath the surface, disclosing full details of how he catches each species and recounting the off-camera highlights of his extraordinary life. From his arrest as a suspected spy in Southeast Asia to a plane crash in the rainforest, every page of the Wall Street Journal bestseller River Monsters is packed with adventure. From the heart of the Congo to the depths of the Amazon, Wade reels in fish of staggering proportions and terrifying demeanor for an unforgettable read.

several minutes, the man hadn’t reappeared, and eventually his companions gave him up for dead. Finally, when they retrieved the net, there was a huge catfish inside, and protruding from its mouth were the legs of their former colleague. Fearful that nobody would believe them, they put the fish, still containing the corpse, inside the ice-filled hold of their mother vessel and took it to the nearest police station. But nobody was clear about exactly where or when this happened until I met Valmi

clamped to water-skiing buoys. Why catfish would go for floating lumps of plastic is something of a mystery, but they are known to be attracted to slapping sounds on the surface, which a wind-chop on the water could have created. The capacity of fish to swallow edible items can also beggar belief. I remember as a child seeing a series of photographs showing two fingerling pike, no more than four inches long, swim up to each other in a tank. When they were nose-to-nose, the pike on the left

is the mouth of the Columbia River, flowing between the states of Washington and Oregon in the United States’ Pacific Northwest. Some 100 miles upriver is the city of Portland, and a little upriver from there but below the Bonneville dam is a hole in the bottom that is ninety feet deep. From a boat anchored at the upstream end of the hole, just off some fluted cliffs that looked like they might have been shaped with a jelly mould, I dropped a dead herringlike shad into the water—a little over a

beyond two or three inches. At this point, you need to paddle into casting range and be ready for the next dimpling, which should be near the last place you saw them if you’ve managed not to scare them off. Then you cast a noisy surface lure beyond the fry ball and bring it back right through the middle of them.... In theory, this provokes a savage strike from one of the parents, but on Khao Laem, the snakeheads know all about fishing lures, so mine were ignored. My only hit was from a ten-inch

predators that could prey on the young. For a start, there are no other sharks and possibly no male bull sharks, which won’t hesitate to eat their own kind. But set against that, a small bull shark isn’t as comfortable physiologically in fresh water as a big one. It has a higher surfacearea-to-volume ratio, so it has to expend much more energy expelling water from its tissues. Giving birth to their young in a river would only make sense if the pros exceeded the cons. To find out more, we needed