Don't forget your life insurance

This is the first season of the positively scary series "River Monsters", aired on Animal Planet. Extreme angler Jeremy Wade travels around the world in search for fish that would make every ghost-hunter, bigfooter or ufologist green of envy. These monsters, after all, are real - and they are firmly entrenched on "our" side of the great material-astral divide...

In one episode, Wade investigates reports about freshwater sharks. He teams up with a group of young men in Australia whose main pastime is to catch bull sharks where the local sewage plant meets the river. Sure enough, Wade manages to catch a young shark that seems to be thriving in the mixture of freshwater and plain old kaka. He also catches an even larger bony fish, the Goliath Grouper, which I found to be scarier than the shark!

In another episode, we follow Wade as he searches the Amazon for the Arapaima, a scaly "dinosaur" fish infamous for attacking and overturning small boats. This fish can knock a man unconscious, leaving him at the mercy of the many scavengers of the river. Once again, it becomes clear to the philosophically-inclined viewer that whoever made this planet, certainly didn't made it for us...

Catfish, piranhas and the alligator gar (which really looks like an alligator!) are other monstrous and hungry "big fish" featured in this season of "River Monsters". Next time you go down to the local lake, don't forget your life insurance!