The Amazon... teeming with wildlife riches
But one part lies totally unexplored.
Under the water.
Now there's an expedition searching for animals hidden in the depths.
It's an international team of scientists, jungle trackers,
divers and cameramen.
All of them experts in their field.
Already they found creatures completely new to science,
and tracked down 24 species never filmed before in the wild.
But the world's greatest river doesn't give up her secrets easily.
They're half way through the expedition.
and now they're searching for new dive sites in the heart of the jungle.
The team is surrounded on all sides by a forest full of life.
But where dangers lurk.
The Amazon is home to the largest snake in the world.
Anacondas grow up to 9 meters.
They can live and hunt on land, but are far more at home in the murky water of the river.
The expedition has two local guides who know the risks better than anyone.
Samuel Basilio and Eduardo Gomez are briefing the divers.
Anacondas maybe, like , does
break your leg, your arm or your body easily.
They may kill you.
I recommend everybody to buy and have a knife, very sharp one.
Don't be too confident after you get in the water,
because that's when happeds the big accidents in the Amazon, even with us.
You have to assume, with an animal that has evolved in a water that is this murky
has evolved a way of detecting a 5 and a half or 6 foot body down there,
You know on the back your head, that they know you're there.
You don't know they're there, and that puts them in a big advantage,
and I don't necessarily like that.
My head's say, yes , ofcourse there are risks, and play it carefully
but my heart says, great, you know, I just wanna do it, I'm not thinking about ... "Is is dangerous ?"
Now they must put their anxieties to one's side.
The have a mission.
Tonight , they are on the shore of this huge river, with the aim of finding a local legend.
A giant catfish.
It's very rare and is never been filmed in the wild.
Kate Humble has found out from local fishermen,
this is a perfect spot for these creatures.
She's diving with cameraman Mike De Gruy to try and catch them on film.
Their best chance is to wait until darkness falls.
The time when many predators prefer to hunt.
A whole support team of divers and crew are on hand.
Safety is paramount.
Shorediving brings new risks from creatures that live on the land,
but hunt in the water.
Dive marshall Richard Bull listens for any note of danger.
Under the water, all concerns have to be put to the back of the mind.
The focus is on finding the giant catfish.
With 3000 species of fish in the Amazon, they never know what they may stumble across.
Previously, these knive-fish, have only been seen from preserved specimens.
Until this was filmed, scientists never knew they swam vertically.
The, in the gloom, they find what they've been searching for.
Megalodorus.
They're built like a battle tank, with bony plates along their back,
and chainsaw spines along their side to protect them from even larger predators.
And they don't like being followed.
We're looking at this weird catfish,
with big spikes all along its side, really really long antenna,
then, right next to it is the most gorgeous ciclyde,
that you would see in a finest home aquarium, anywhere in the world.
Unbelivable beauty of the fish that live here,
and we've just scratched the surface, we've only just begun.
Spurred on by success, the team head deeped into the jungle.
As they travel, they see tantalising glimpses of a troop of monkeys.
They decide to split into two groups.
Kate will strike out in the forest, to try and track down the monkeys.
So rich... there is so much wild life,
insect life, bird life, monkeys,
extraordinary plants, it would be nice to get out there more,
because , you know, I feel the pull of it.
She heads off with Samuel, an expert forest tracker.
You know what, it's so amazing about looking at this forest
Every tree is different,
the diversity is extraordinary.
Another brief sighting of the monkey troop,
running through the tops of the highest trees.
The dive team's task is to get to the very bottom of the deepest Amazon.
Hidden in the water is an abyss,
a deep channel, gouged into the river bed, beneath them.
Scientists have no idea what lies in its depths.
This is going to be their most challenging dive yet.
But in order to dive in it, first they have to find it.
I feel very comfortable, that we're gonna see something we have never seen before.
I really strongly feel that. We're gonna be far deeper than we've been before.
I'm realy excited about what we're doing right now.
Kate and Samuel are on their search for the monkey troop.
Moving throught the jungle safely takes experience and care.
Just be careful, don't put your hand on the trees
watch if there's no disguised insects
They won't kill you, but it really hurts.
It's full of scorpions,.. also, there are a lot of snakes...
The rainforest is full of animals that protect themselves with poisons, even caterpillars.
Very strong ones, touch it, burn and hurts a lot,
It hurts for like 2-3 hours. It looks toxic.
Incredible piece of design, those.
Hidden under the leaf litter, the forest teems with life.
They have to watch where they thread.
In a hole on the edge of the path, a creature lurks.
The giant white-kneed tarantula.
So, this spider would be trapping what ... Small mammals,
birds...
...insects. Is it poisonous ? Yes.
Samuel can lasso this spider, he must take care.
This tarantula defends itself by flicking
stinging hairs through the air at any potential foe.
Incredible jaws
I never seen this kind before.
In the Amazon, new animals are waiting to be discovered all the time.
Back on the river, their search for unusual species is also one step further.
The deep trench has been located. At 45 meters,
it's deep enough to hide the Statue of Liberty.
No one has ever been to the bottom.
The curents here are fast and unpredictable.
It would take good seamanship to secure the boat safely.
Kate and Samuel have heard monkey calls.
The've caught up with their troop,
and they're squirrel monkeys.
I'ts just one of over 50 species of monkeys in the Amazon.
They spend their lives in the treetops, searching for insects, young birds, and fruit.
Life is bursting from the top of the jungle.
But the bottom of the river is a complete mystery.
The boat is safely anchored,
and now the divers must compose their minds, before the enter the water.
For Mike and his partner, Florian Graner
it would be all too easy to get lost, or swept away by the current.
They will be diving deeper into the Amazon, than anyone has ever been.
The river is a soup of stirred-up sediment.
The deeper they drop, the worse it gets.
The surface crew monitor every word.
And a safety diver waits on stand-by.
The visibility is so bad, that he's having to hold on to Florian.
At the bottom of the hole, the divers sink to their waists in thick, clinging mud.
The decide to abort the dive, and send a surface marker to guide them up.
The have the most advanced camera in the world, but all they have filmed is mud.
It is complete blackness, mud, not--
I mean, the particles, that's why I said, lets just stop and see what it is
It was big particles of... gunk...
No one had expected the visibility to be this bad.
There's going to be no way to film deep water creatures in this stretch of the river.
For now, they're forced to head back to shallower water.
The team put togheter a plan.
The belive that there may be a site with clear water,
hidden in the trees.
It's the end of the dry season,
and in the past 4 months, the water level here has dropped 8 meters,
creating lakes into the forest.
They hope that these trapped lakes have water clear enough to film in.
To test the theory, Mike and Kate set off to recon a lake ahead of the main dive party.
Jungle guide Eduardo Gomez knows these shallow lakes hide danger.
Did anyone mentioned aligators and snakes to us, before we set off in this expedition ?
I missed that part.
That's it. It's clear !
This is the first time we heard anything about clear water.
And it's actually clear.
The opening to the lake.
The've stumbled across a treasure chest.
A lake that is full of the most beautiful tropical fish.
It's like an aquarium down there, there so many different--
Seen 7 different species so far...
and we have't even started.
After all that muck, we're in danger of getting vertigo.
The found a school of flag ciclydes.
These peaceful fish choose their partners with care,
mate for life, and even guard their young.
Richard Bull has arrived, to keep a weary eye on the snorklers.
Suddenly there's a problem.
Richard has stepped into the water, and almost stood on a snake.
By the time the camera has got there, the snake has slithered back into the water weeds.
It was quite thin
you know I like constricting snakes, they're quite fat, this was long and stringy,
striped, in one way or another.
And it was heading towards me.
Eduardo, what had happend if I was bitten ?
Your limbs doesn't work anymore, so you can't breathe, and you die in a few minutes.
They are not big snakes, but are very, very poisonous.
Mike, don't go in there, because that coral snake is in there.
What does it look like ? Stripey.
Seemed very, very agile.
Dead man within 3 minutes
It's a 3 minute snake ? It's a 3 minute snake, yeah.
And it's still down there, in that weed, somewhere.
The coral snake is the most deadly reptile on the continent.
Their venom rapidly destroys the human nervous system.
But this is also the perfect habitat for a much larger snake.
The Anaconda.
As evening falls, the rest of the team arrives to start filming.
Wildlife cameraman Mike Pitts approaches cautiously.
Working in locations like this, you're never quite sure what you're gonna see.
Now, we've all been talking about--
the dangers of these locations, ... and
I don't think you have to look very far to realise that there are gonna be
some things to worry about.
It's a risk the cameraman have to take.
The lake has an extraordinary abundance of life.
After night is fallen, Florian joins Mike.
The contrast with the river could't be greater.
Bringing the latest technology to the remotest Amazon, is at last, paying off,
as the divers film gems hidden in the hollows.
Thread-finned cicydes search for food along the river bed.
While discus-fish hide in a tangle of tree roots.
The scientists belive this is one of the only lakes in the whole of the Amazon with water as clear as this.
But this Eden contains many snakes.
The divers have disturbed a boa constrictor,
as it hunts the lake's edge.
And Florian had found the snake that almost attacked Richard.
I looked down, and I had this coral snake, going through the sand
digging in, and coming out. You got this poisonous snake on the hunt.
Hunting for fish.
There could be even greater dangers out in the darkness.
I just come out to the surface to see where I am,
and there, these big, big eyes, further down, like this far apart,
and, we're thinking, it's either a big anaconda or it's a croc.
Cayman, so it was a little bit hairy.
A million people live along the river margins of the Amazon.
And for them, poisonous snakes and predators
are an unfortunate fact of life.
There are many stories of children and adults attacked and killed.
From a nearby village, a fisherman has come to meet the team.
He has a tale to tell about the biggest predator of them all.
Raymondo Mota was cleaning his hands in the river
when an anaconda grabbed him around the leg.
It was 5 meters long, so it can be like this.
So he felt the pressure, then what ?
The snake was trying to drag him into the water to drown him.
It snapped his leg, but he managed to wrap his arms around a tree.
4 gours he was attached to your leg ? Yes, yes
And he could not do anything, because
if he tried using his hands-- it would drag him...
What happened after 4 hous ?
He thinks that the snake got tired
And when he feld that it wasnt big pressure, he jumped.
That's when he got these lacerations.
Local people sometimes destroy the anaconda when they find them.
For them it can be a case of kill, or be killed.
Samuel and Eduardo hear that there's a large anaconda living close to the lake.
For the sake of the snake, and the local people
they decide to track down, and move the anaconda.
But it's not the only predator around.
Florian is searching for jungle crocodiles.
Since he saw the red eyes staring at him in the lake,
he's been convinced that nearby is a nest of caymans.
Here we have...
a whole group of little caymans.
He must approach very slowly.
If these babies make an alarm call, the parents may come.
We're wondering where mom and dad are, really.
If you want to find anaconda, you must follow your nose.
They have a very distinct odour.
I want you feel with me.
Yeah, Yeah... it's a snake.
You think so ? Yeah, I think it's big !
Don't let it go ! I got it
You got the head ? Slow down !
This thing is gonna come out fast. Yeah.
Sombody better help me here, at the head.
Can't belive we found this.
If the anaconda were left, it could be killed by local people.
Possibly kill a human itself.
Can you raise that head ? I wanna get a look at that.
At the cayman nest, there's still no sign of mother.
And the babies are getting very relaxed.
They're becoming quite sociable.
That is just unbelivable.
These caymans have just come up right to the camera
I didn't have to go to them... for a change.
The scientists from the boats have come to help.
Once secured in the crate, the anaconda will be taken to a safe new home.
A nature reserve far away from human habitation.
Over the past week, the team has broken new depth records for diving the Amazon.
And has found a dozen species never filmed before in the wild.
Now it is time for them to head up river
but nothing goes to plan in the Amazon.
They've struck bottom, the boat has jutted to a stop.
It seems to me that either the shaft is bent, the struts flapping around
Problem is, the struts are bolted into the hull.
You knock the strut to the side, it pulls a piece of wood
We got a hole in the hull.
Mike Pitts voluntairs to inspect the damage.
The thing is, we're taking up water.
The momentum of a ship of that size , 60 ton vessel, going over the top of the rock
it would open up like a can of sardines.
The boat is taking on water, and the propeller is bent.
In the darkness, 2 divers grope their way onto the bottom of the hull,
hoping to find the full extent of the damage.
They're marooned on a sandbank in the middle of the Amazon.
The expedition has judded to a halt.