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Documentary, River Monsters S05E05 Vampires of the Deep
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00:00My name is Jeremy Wade, angler, biologist and freshwater detective.
00:17I've traveled the world to uncover the river monsters behind mysterious and bloody attacks.
00:23But for every case I solve another floats to the surface.
00:29On the Canadian border I've heard of a vast and brooding lake that hides a dark history.
00:38For Native Americans it is an ancient and sacred site.
00:44But recently something has risen up from its murky depths to attack swimmers.
00:53They are extremely fast, extremely aggressive, they are very difficult to kill and they want your blood.
01:02What's behind this nightmarish invasion of primordial bloodsuckers?
01:08I'm embarking on a punishing mission to battle the most ancient river monster I've ever encountered.
01:15And reveal the true identity of the vampires of the deep.
01:20The myth of the vampire has a terrifying grip on our imagination.
01:37Ancient, undying and forever feeding on the blood of its human victims.
01:43I thought Latin America was home to the only real vertebrate to drink human blood.
01:52The vampire bat.
01:55Until I discovered an equally bloodthirsty catfish with very nasty habits living there too.
02:01The candiru.
02:03This fish is just leaking blood.
02:05It's not this fish's blood.
02:06It's something it's been feeding on.
02:08It is just an absolute nightmare vampire fish this thing.
02:12Now I'm hearing that there might be another aquatic vampire attacking humans.
02:19A lot bigger and a lot more bloodthirsty than the candiru.
02:24This time not in South America but in North.
02:28On a vast body of water straddling the border between the US and Canada.
02:32Lake Champlain.
02:35Where a vampiric creature is said to be targeting swimmers.
02:40One story tells of a man who attempted to swim the six miles across the lake.
02:47In the middle something seized onto his leg.
02:53He kept sinking as he struggled to get free.
03:03When he finally got away he was left with a strange circular mark.
03:08Said to be the bite of a bloodsucker.
03:14I've come to the lake to find out if these attack stories are actually true.
03:22Just a couple of hours in the air can tell you so much more than several days at ground level.
03:32Flying really reveals the lie of the land or in this case the lie of the water.
03:37I've already heard reports of giant pike and ten foot sturgeon.
03:44But the best way for me to identify a perpetrator is to get a line in the water.
03:49The question is, where do I start?
03:52This vast lake is 125 miles long and in places plunges to 400 foot deep.
04:02During the last ice age this was actually an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean and all manner of creatures were free to come and go.
04:08Seals, walrus, even whales and who knows what else.
04:26Native Americans have fished this murky lake from the last ice age right up to the present day.
04:33For a tribe called the Abenaki, or people of the dawn, it is sacred.
04:38Home to powerful underwater spirits.
04:41Tradition demands they make offerings of tobacco smoke to placate the spirits before setting out on the lake's often treacherous waters.
04:49When Europeans arrived, the Abenaki way of life changed beyond recognition.
04:56But some of their fishing expertise has survived.
05:00Roger Longtose Sheehan, chief of the Elnu band, shows me tools that have helped them catch fish from the lake for centuries.
05:08These look like some kinds of fishing implements. What exactly are they?
05:12A gouge, which is made of bone. You put your bait over the top of it.
05:16The fish would swallow it, and when you yank it up, it gets caught inside of them, and you pull them up.
05:21Sort of a forerunner of a hook, in fact, just a simpler version of that.
05:25Yeah. You have bonefish hooks, which are real common here in the northeast.
05:30They're not as strong as the gouge because they can crack away here.
05:35So here you have bone fishing spears made out of moose bone, again wrapped with cordage,
05:43and then covered with the spruce tar to make it waterproof.
05:48Today, few Abenaki use traditional tackle, but they do still rely on traditional knowledge handed down over millennia.
05:57Knowledge, I hope, will help me close in on the mystery bloodsucker.
06:02I'm looking at this body of water here, and I'm thinking you'd be waiting a long time until you get some kind of target.
06:06Except for when you know where they are, like when they're spawning into the rivers,
06:10in which case we have many accounts of the fish being so thick that people say you can almost walk on them.
06:17So although this is a big body of water and the fish at the moment are pretty spread out,
06:22but if you know the times and the places, you can go to where there's a very rich food source.
06:27Yes.
06:31The Abenaki people discovered a very long time ago that at certain times of the year,
06:36certain of the creatures in fact come very, very close to the edge of the lake,
06:39even enter some of the rivers and streams that feed it.
06:42And the reason they do this is to breed.
06:45And it turns out that I'm actually here at about the right time.
06:49So it's now a case of pinpointing those places.
06:55Some of the lake's bedrock is around a billion years old.
06:59There's something very eerie and ancient about this place.
07:05Rogers told me that some of the predatory fish here are incredibly ancient too.
07:09One, which some Native Americans call the Chauzerou,
07:12occasionally gathers in the shallows to breed.
07:16It's going to be a challenge to get their attention.
07:39What I thought was a bite was in fact the hook catching on this tough creature's armour.
08:04Not reacting at all.
08:10I'm trying to remember the last time I fished with so many fish visible in front of me,
08:14but the lack of interest is really frustrating.
08:16But occasionally, if you just get the lure in their face, it just tempts this reflex.
08:21Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, that's one hooked, that's one hooked.
08:30I'm just hoping that hook stays attached.
08:32The fish some Native Americans called the Chauzerou, I know by a different name.
08:53This is a long-nosed gar. Very, very ancient fish.
08:57That armour plating was probably protecting it against pterodactyls back in the day.
09:02And those teeth, very, very spiky and sharp.
09:06The Abenaki use the gar's teeth to carve tattoos, so these fangs can certainly draw blood.
09:13But I can't see how this elongated snout could create the circular bite described by the swimmer.
09:18If I'm to find the culprit, I need to scout out more potential breeding sites along the lake shore.
09:33The lake sits between two mountain ranges, which act as a wind tunnel.
09:39Gusts of 60 miles an hour have been known to whip calm water into seven-foot swells.
09:44I'm grateful my hunt is confined to the margins for now.
09:52We're actually right in the shallows, a couple of feet deep, if that.
09:56Conditions are not ideal, but at least that is making it harder for the fish to see us, potentially.
10:01So we're just nosing around very slowly to see if we can see any movement in the water.
10:09I think about fishes, even in shallow, clear water, it's amazing how they can hide.
10:15Can a carefully placed lure entice a predator with a taste for blood out of hiding?
10:23Here we go.
10:29Oh, he's in the weeds!
10:32On a vast lake that stretches across the U.S.-Canadian border, I'm on the hunt for an aquatic vampire that attacks swimmers.
10:52And what I'm trying to do now is what I do best, catching a potential suspect on Rod and Rhine.
11:02Oi! Oh, yeah.
11:04Hey!
11:08Whoa, this is a bowfin.
11:09This is a bowfin.
11:10That was just a black shape, a horizontal white line.
11:15This is a toothy animal here, but also very colourful, amazingly colourful.
11:19It's believed this vivid green is designed to attract females in the mating season.
11:25I'm holding it with this grip because even with these gloves, those teeth might go through.
11:31Quite a similarity with snakehead in a way, the head, the teeth, the eye spot on the tail.
11:36Bowfin are a relative of the gar and the only survivors of an ancient family of fish that evolved around a hundred million years ago.
11:45This lake really does feel like a sanctuary for some of the oldest fish on the planet.
11:51Their swim bladder can act as a lung, letting them survive out of water for several hours.
11:57And their impressive jaws can close like a vice, easily drawing blood.
12:01But nothing in this reveals the perpetrator I'm looking for.
12:07These are not the jaws of a blood sucker.
12:10In fact, it looks like this fish might have been on the receiving end of an attack.
12:14If I just had the fish slightly supported, actually just behind this pectoral fin,
12:19there's this red circular mark.
12:21And something has, something's had a go, done something to this fish.
12:26Attached to it, rasped it, which ties in with some of the stories I've been hearing.
12:29Is the mystery vampire leaving the same circular wound on humans and fish?
12:36Amazing that even a fish as tough and aggressive as a bowfin is not immune.
12:41It makes me think that the blood sucker I'm after is even more aggressive and powerful.
12:47But where is it lurking?
12:48Large predators sometimes wait in ambush on the edge of fast flowing water.
13:05It's time to hunt out the places where the currents are strong.
13:08What we tend to think of as an enclosed body of water is in fact a lot more complex than that.
13:17There's actually a couple of hundreds of these waterways feeding the lake.
13:23And from up here, they're almost like watery tentacles reaching their way inland.
13:27More than 8,000 square miles of surrounding forest and mountains drain into these rivers and streams, making their flows highly volatile.
13:41On the western shore, I've found a river that has deep, churning water and plenty of eddies for toothy predators to stalk.
13:52I've scaled up my lure from one that looks like a bug to one that looks like a fish to attract larger hunters.
13:59The predators here don't hang around.
14:21That's something that looks a bit carp-like on the end there.
14:24Right, so that's what that took.
14:30That's interesting.
14:32Sucker-like mouth.
14:35About the same size as the wound on the fish, but it's rubbery.
14:39It has no teeth, so I can't see how this fish could create that red wound on the bowfin with suction alone.
14:47This is called a red horse sucker, so the red is very obvious, the sucking mouth is very obvious.
14:54And it's actually gone, it's gone back into the river.
15:01Well that fish, to me, looked like a herbivore, a vegetarian.
15:09That toothless, sucking mouth.
15:11So what was it doing, going after something that very clearly was mimicking a fast-moving live fish about six inches long?
15:21There's definitely some stuff going on in this river that I'm struggling to understand.
15:26In my travels I did once come across vegetarian fish turning into carnivores, the Amazonian paku.
15:35When it was translocated halfway around the world to Papua New Guinea, it stripped the rivers of vegetation and turned into a voracious meat-eater, terrorizing local fishermen.
15:45I wonder if the balance in Lake Champlain is out of kilter too, enough to change a fish's behaviour so it attacks other fish and humans.
15:59I've no way of knowing until I catch it, so I have to keep knocking suspects off the list.
16:09That's a lovely fish.
16:14A European carp. It's one of more than 80 species in the lake.
16:20Making my quest for the vampire of the deep far from simple.
16:27Heading into the deep water where the attack on the swimmer took place seems like an obvious next step.
16:33But it's going to be a lot harder to hunt down contenders out here.
16:39I've got to step things up again.
16:41I've now got three lures out now, two flashy silver spoons arranged on this downrigger outfit here, so an eight-pound lump of lead, the line clipped to that, and then the lure following about sort of 30, 40 feet behind.
17:00Then I've got a surface lure out from this outrigger here.
17:03So we're going along about two miles an hour, and it's really a waiting game now, waiting for one of these rods to move.
17:08To move.
17:11I've no idea where the predator might be hiding, so this spread of lines lets me fish both the warm surface layer as well as the cold, dark depths.
17:25Fish on!
17:26Here we go.
17:29What I discover out here reveals an assault on a whole new scale.
17:33There it is.
17:37Long-nosed gar are covered in very tough scales, but what protects their eggs from predation? The answer will surprise you.
17:44What protects gar eggs from predation? They're laced with a toxin that's highly poisonous to mammals, including humans. This is one kind of caviar you don't want to eat.
17:58Fish on!
18:05My hunt for a blood-sucking aquatic vampire has led me to the heart of an ancient lake on the U.S.-Canadian border.
18:14I can see the fish.
18:15Is this the creature that's been attacking swimmers?
18:21Here we go.
18:23So this is my first fish out of the main body of the lake.
18:26Toothy predator.
18:28Lovely patterning on it.
18:30And that is a lake trout.
18:32People think of, you know, brown trout and rainbow trout, fish in shallow waters, but this is a deep water species.
18:37It's actually very cold to the touch.
18:40This is my first one of these, and it's just a lovely, very nicely marked fish.
18:45Hey, what's going on there?
18:47This fish is marked in more ways than one.
18:50It appears to be another victim of the mystery attacker.
18:54Something's had a go at it.
18:55It looks just like the mark I saw on the bowfin, and in the same place.
19:02I've got to get my bait back in the water to find out just how widespread these attacks are.
19:09This has also got something behind the pectoral fin.
19:13And what I find is victim after victim.
19:17Just by my little finger here, there's a mark.
19:21It looks like these hunters have become the hunted.
19:26There's four of these fish I caught today, and they've all got these strange marks on them.
19:32So that's 100% record whatever it is has been hitting these fish.
19:36The thing is, I mean, the only thing I know that use marks like that is giant squid on things like sperm whales.
19:43But where does that leave me on a freshwater lake?
19:46Although it was once connected to the open ocean, the idea of giant squid here now, I'm not convinced.
19:55So what else could account for these distinct wounds?
19:59I still don't know.
20:00But one thing I'm now sure of is that whatever's behind the attacks on fish must be responsible for the attacks on humans too.
20:09And finally, I have an opportunity to find out the truth.
20:12I've heard of a long-distance swimmer named Christopher Swain, who's got an attack story to tell.
20:22He takes me back to the place where he came face to face with a primitive creature from the deep.
20:28Can you take me through exactly what happened?
20:32I was in the midst of a 129-mile swim of the entire length of the lake.
20:37Most of the days were relatively uneventful. It's the same old thing.
20:42That day, I'd been swimming for two or three hours already.
20:46The very first thing felt a lot like when your mobile phone's in your pocket and it vibrates.
20:51And the next thing I thought was that I'd caught on something. Sometimes it's a plant.
20:57But what plant could catch him in a hundred foot of water?
21:01So I reached down to brush whatever it was on my leg off.
21:06And I touched a living thing that was attached to me.
21:11There was something thicker than my wrist around that was moving like this.
21:22Then I just had a bit of a freak out.
21:26Because the next image that I saw when I put my goggles in was snake-like.
21:31I made another try to grab it and it slimed right out of my hand.
21:36So this thing that's on your leg, it's writhing around, what was it?
21:39It turned out to be about three and a half, four foot long sea lamprey.
21:47Sea lampreys are survivors from the depths of time.
21:51Like aquatic vampires, the adults are blood parasites that attach to other fish to feed when in the ocean.
21:58But they head into fresh water to spawn.
22:02Their mouths are made up of a powerful suction disc lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth.
22:09In the centre lies the ultimate weapon, a piston-like tongue tipped with rasping plates, which bores its way into its host.
22:18Once attached, it may feed for hours, days or even weeks, growing fat on its prey's blood.
22:28I ended up pulling it off and the first time I pulled it off, it shot back on.
22:33They don't want to be removed.
22:35So I got a hold of the thing finally and I managed to throw it.
22:38So I remember seeing it like in the air like a snake flailing around and go fall.
22:44This thing, it somehow just short-circuited your rational response in a way.
22:48You know, I've been caught in lightning storms, I've swum through nuclear waste, I've been run over by boats.
22:55This is the thing that got to me the most.
22:58They're extremely fast, extremely aggressive, very hard to fight, very difficult to kill, and they want your blood and nutrients.
23:07It turns out I'm after a formidable and unhookable aquatic vampire.
23:16So how do I possibly catch one?
23:19Is offering myself up as base the only way?
23:22I'm on the hunt for a blood-sucking vampire that's rising up from the depths of a vast lake on the US-Canadian border.
23:49Sea lampreys usually attach to larger fish in the ocean to feed, but recently it seems they've begun to attack swimmers too,
24:01who've dared to venture into the lake's deeper waters.
24:05But what exactly are they and why are they attacking humans?
24:13I'm hoping one woman has the answers.
24:15Dr. Ellen Marsden has become a specialist in these resilient bloodsuckers, which are commonly confused with eels.
24:25But this is by far the most ancient river monster I've ever attempted to catch.
24:30Seeing eel and lamprey side by side, the difference starts to become clear.
24:34This is a true vertebrate. This is a proto-vertebrate. It's just in the process of becoming a vertebrate.
24:40It doesn't have a bony backbone. It has no bones in the body at all.
24:43It's so primitive it doesn't even have a true jaw. It has no lower mandible. It can't bite.
24:48Whereas an eel has a true jaw and can actually bite into something.
24:53So it's a fish, but it's the very beginning of the fish lineage.
24:55Around 300 million years of evolution separate these two animals.
25:02In fact, we have more in common with the eel than the eel does with the lamprey.
25:07So the predation is all about this structure on the front, is it?
25:13Right. And it's rather deceptive because you think, wow, all those teeth.
25:16They are teeth, but not in the way we think of them. They're not to bite. These are just grippers.
25:22It's like having gripper gloves to be able to grab something that's slimy.
25:26The thing that does the damage is actually down here in the mouth itself.
25:30So it has a tongue, much like the eel has a tongue. And on that tongue are chisel-like teeth.
25:36So this tongue is acting like a piston. It's going to come out and actually it rasps a hole in a fish.
25:41And again, it can't bite. So having rasped a hole into the fish, it's then going to use suction to suck body fluids, blood and other material out of that hole that it's just made.
25:52I've been catching fish on the lake here and they are showing these very characteristic wounds.
25:58I've never come across that anywhere else. So what exactly is going on here?
26:02What's going on is we have an imbalance between the number of lamprey and the number of fish they're trying to feed on.
26:06It's believed that man-made canals connecting the lake to the ocean opened the floodgates to the lamprey.
26:16The environment they found was perfect.
26:21So they stopped returning to the sea.
26:24As their numbers climbed, so did the attacks on fish, and then swimmers.
26:36I've heard story after story, yet so far the lamprey has managed to elude me.
26:41But Dr. Marsden's told me of a river where they intercepted as they head upstream in their thousands to spawn.
26:50I'm going there to meet Brad Young of US Fish and Wildlife to see a fish trap like no other.
26:57This dam was constructed specifically for the purpose of blocking sea lamprey adults as they try to spawn.
27:05It's about nine miles upstream from the lake.
27:07So they've been able to swim up on their own from here.
27:10They can swim about three feet per second and go over rapids without any problem.
27:14So as they're migrating upstream to find places to build nests and reproduce,
27:18we intercept them in this trap, and the sea lamprey are taken out and destroyed on site.
27:22Usually the river monsters I hunt are elusive creatures that are often revered or even protected.
27:32But it's a different story here.
27:35Culling has started to reduce the number of attacks.
27:40And the trap may be my only chance to get my hands on this primeval predator.
27:45But that means descending into a cramped concrete cell in the middle of the dam.
27:53A cell that could be harboring hundreds of blood-sucking lampreys.
27:58Oh!
28:00Ah!
28:02I think I just shot on something.
28:06Oh, oh, oh, there's a lot around the intake.
28:10A lot around there.
28:11Ah!
28:12I can just feel it's soft.
28:14There you go.
28:15Oh, yeah.
28:24Ah!
28:26I've just got a knot of lampreys in here.
28:29And they...
28:31Gosh, they...
28:33It's quite a sight.
28:34There's something about anything snake-like.
28:36It just produces that sort of instinctive squirmy reaction.
28:41I really don't know if I want to handle these.
28:49Ah!
28:51Right.
28:53Here we go.
28:54Oh, look, that's one attached to another one there.
28:56That's wriggling.
28:57I'm...
28:58Right, okay.
28:59There.
29:00Oh, right, okay.
29:01Do we put them in the other net there?
29:02Absolutely.
29:04Yeah.
29:06Look at this.
29:07Look at this.
29:08Ah!
29:09That is a very, very strange sensation.
29:10Very strange.
29:11And it's looking me right in the eye.
29:12Ah!
29:13That's a good way to calm them down.
29:14But I now need to get it off and get it in the...
29:15Oh, look at that.
29:16It's actually...
29:17Oh!
29:18I've been bitten by fish before, but, I mean, that was pretty creepy.
29:19Ah!
29:20That's when something just went through my legs.
29:21Ah!
29:22Ah!
29:23Ah!
29:24Ah!
29:25Ah!
29:26Ah!
29:27Ah!
29:28Ah!
29:29Ah!
29:30Ah!
29:31Ah!
29:32Ah!
29:33Ah!
29:34Ah!
29:35Ah!
29:36Ah!
29:37Ah!
29:38Ah!
29:39Ah!
29:40Ah!
29:41Ah!
29:42Ah!
29:43Ah!
29:46The다 AGENT
29:46That is the secret, that efet of Kelvin's
29:47another car in Helvetilus lor 하반.
29:49But with the
29:55economy demand, Riverwater, less flexibility, these primitive bloodsucks find it easy to outmaneuver
29:56me.
29:57Right, that's a pretty good haul.
29:59That's me, catching the lamprey.
30:00The next stage, which I'm not particularly looking forward to, is them catching me.
30:02It's time to face up to these aquatic vampires in their own territory.
30:02Oh, ah!
30:04Ah!
30:05andere
30:07The sea lamprey is the most ancient river monster I've ever encountered.
30:17The parallels with vampires are striking.
30:21They both tap into that same dark place, the prime of fear that they'll drain the life force from us.
30:30I've waded through their writhing bodies in a trap built to eradicate them.
30:35Now I'm going face-to-face, fang-to-vein, with a real, living vampire.
30:46And that's a strange feeling, that's a very strange feeling.
30:49There's suction, but there's something sharp going on as well.
30:55It's really getting stuck in there.
31:00The thing is, if you get these things attached, you're actually going to want to get them off.
31:04If you're swimming, you're needing your limbs to keep you afloat, to keep you moving.
31:08So what are you going to do? You've got these creatures attaching to you.
31:12Do I carry on swimming with maybe more and more attaching?
31:14Or do I stop swimming and try and get these things off?
31:21Ah, easier said than done.
31:23Ah, ah, come on.
31:25That is hard to get off. That is hard. That is hard to get off.
31:28Ah, ah!
31:33I don't know if there's a mark there or not. Hopefully there's not a big red hole.
31:40That feels a bit sore. I mean, these things are like aquatic vampires.
31:43I don't think that's an experience I want to repeat.
31:47Yeah.
31:50I think I've seen and felt enough.
31:52Enough.
31:56But netting a lamprey in someone else's trap is not my idea of catching a river monster.
32:04I need to face up to this creature my way.
32:07To do that, I have to travel two and a half thousand miles to the Pacific Northwest,
32:13where I've heard that lampreys are caught using a traditional but dangerous technique.
32:26This is the Pacific, and there's another species of lamprey that lives here.
32:30I've heard that it's bigger than the ones I've seen so far.
32:33It's also toothier. The scientific name means three-fanged lamprey.
32:37And they're found all the way from Mexico right up to Alaska,
32:41all the way around the Pacific Rim to Russia and Japan.
32:44But right now, it's breeding season, and they're coming into the rivers.
32:50So that's where I'm heading.
32:54The Columbia River acts as a highway for salmon, sturgeon and lampreys
32:59as they head hundreds of miles inland to spawn.
33:02Many obstacles stand in their way on their journey upstream.
33:07The first is the Bonneville Dam, where a window into a fish ladder
33:12gives me a terrifying glimpse of what I'll be up against.
33:15Well, here they are. These are Pacific lamprey,
33:19and they are quite a bit larger than the ones I've seen so far.
33:22And also the teeth are significantly larger, quite gruesome.
33:25And again, just the sheer numbers of them.
33:28This is a mass invasion of underwater vampires.
33:34But despite their gruesome appearance, their arrival here is celebrated.
33:41While the sea lamprey is despised and feared in the east,
33:45the Pacific lamprey is virtually revered in the northwest.
33:48In generations past, Native Americans relied on these creatures
33:54as an important seasonal harvest.
33:57Over the years, they've seen many of their customs vanish.
34:01But here at the plank house of the confederated tribes of Grand Ronde,
34:06some ancient traditions still survive.
34:09Greg Archuleta catches and cooks lampreys using traditional methods.
34:14They don't have bone, they have a cartilage,
34:19so this thing has to be pulled all the way out.
34:22It's kind of a real elastic cord.
34:24You've got to get the whole thing out, because if you're not,
34:26it gives it a bitter taste.
34:27So what you've got left is just skin and meat, nothing else?
34:30Yeah. So now it's ready, we'll put it on the fire.
34:33Given the choice of salmon or lamprey,
34:36many native elders go for lamprey every time.
34:38So I'm hoping this primordial predator's flesh tastes a whole lot better than it looks.
34:45Have a taste.
34:50I'll tell you what it reminds me of a little bit.
34:53It reminds me a little bit of mackerel, you know,
34:55because that mackerel is very oily and you've got that crispy skin.
34:58Whereabouts do these actually come from?
35:00These come from Willamette Falls, and actually my family came from that area.
35:04From essentially time of memorial, we say, you know,
35:07our people have been there and fished there.
35:09Willamette Falls probably has one of the larger runs in this area now.
35:13They can come from the ocean to the falls without any obstacles,
35:16so there's still a good run there.
35:18But they are diminishing, so the tribes are working to try to get the runs improved again.
35:23In the past, gathering this gift from nature was easy.
35:28Migrating lampreys literally covered the rocks at the falls.
35:31But now they're in decline, harvesters must negotiate the heart of the thundering falls,
35:39and wrench them from deep rock crevices and churning pools.
35:45Entering the lair of this ancient bloodsucker is not only dangerous, but frankly horrifying.
35:50It's extremely rare for outsiders to join the hunt, but the Grand Ronde have made an exception.
35:59I hope I can repay their generosity with a decent haul of lamprey.
36:04Tribal council member Peter Wakeland and his son Tory take me up the turbulent waters of the Willamette River towards the falls.
36:15Bruises are very common. There's a lot of big boulders in there. It's very slippery.
36:21Presumably you can't see anything?
36:22I think it's definitely an art of feel. You're just going to be pretty much blind and feeling away down in there.
36:30Yeah.
36:32150 miles from the ocean, we're on the same migratory path as salmon, sturgeon and lamprey.
36:38Anything swimming up the Willamette River is eventually going to encounter this.
36:4540 foot high wall of rock, curving round for 1500 feet.
36:50I'm awestruck by the challenge facing both the fish and us.
36:55In terms of the volume of water, these are the biggest falls in the entire US after Niagara.
37:01And you can well understand how this is going to cause a pause in the fish migrations.
37:06And this is why people have been coming to this place for millennia.
37:11And it's into this water that I've got to go.
37:26In the Pacific Northwest, I'm about to throw myself into the pounding waters of the Willamette Falls
37:32on the hunt for the blood sucking lamprey.
37:34We're going to make our way up above these boulders.
37:38We want to work our way across the face and check in all those cracks.
37:42I'll be working blind. The only aids I have are cotton gloves to improve my grip on these slimy serpent-like vampires.
37:52Peter tries to shield me from the huge surge that's pulling at our legs under the water.
38:06Any of us could get sucked under and drown.
38:10The sound is deafening. I can barely hear Peter's instructions. I'm desperate to get my hands on a lamprey, but I'm coming up empty.
38:22Further up, there's a rock face where lampreys congregate right under the highest falls. But the risks are much greater. I don't think we have a choice.
38:34We're going to have to get further into the falls.
38:36We're going to have to get further into the falls.
38:38The slick basalt is lethal. If I slip, I could be forced under and pinned down by the thundering water. I wouldn't be the first person to drown here.
38:50I think we're going to go in and try to get a good foothold so you don't get flushed over the edge.
39:14start reaching down feeling you're not going to be able to see and there's a
39:17lot of water coming over today around 20,000 cubic feet per second
39:37the only way to prize them off is to get right behind their mouths but they're in
39:43a very deep crevice
39:58and there it is this is a real first for me this is a fish that can't be caught on a bait on a rod and line
40:07and there are the three fans but one fish doesn't make a feast
40:15just as I've mastered my technique I feel something hit me dozens of lampreys are flying out of the
40:39foils
40:42from this hole so we've got to go into the even wilder water here
40:54behind the torrents lampreys are suffering their way up the 40-foot rock face to the river above
41:00this is my last chance to seize these writhing vampires
41:30I'm hoping to bag at least 30
41:34Peter finally says we have enough
41:39even though I've now got one in my hands the lamprey is still a very hard creature to pin down
41:46to some people it's this hideous invader but to others it's a gift from nature
41:50and with its snake-like body its vampire-like feeding habits you can well understand why for some people
41:58this has become the stuff of nightmares
42:01a primordial vampire that's been on the earth longer than any other river monster I've encountered
42:10for behind the scenes stories fishing games and more go to animalplanet.com slash rivermonsters
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