If it seems to you like Jeremy Wade has the best job in the world – traveling the world, catching fish – you might want to think again. The extreme angler and River Monsters host is back on Animal Planet for a third season, and this time, he had to soak himself in fish guts and offer himself as bait to giant killer eels.
Wade was trying to solve the mystery of a mysterious snake-like creature that had been terrorizing New Zealand – except that New Zealand doesn't have any snakes. Wade's best guess was that this monster was a freshwater eel.
"We heard from a man who saw some eels overpowering a live sheep, then boring into the sheep by way of its anus and eating out its intestines," Wade tells PEOPLEPets.com. "The more we heard about these eels, the more we thought they might be quite unpleasant."
Luckily, Wade's intestines went unharmed, but he did manage to grab one of the giant eels in his arms to show his audience just how scary it could be. The rest of the third season explores similarly unlikely mysteries of fish with hands, or fish with human-like teeth.
"What we're doing is getting beyond the more obvious fishy monsters," Wade says. "There's quite a lot of strange animals out there which don't necessarily, at first sight, tend to fit the bill."
For fans of the first two seasons of River Monsters, which featured large and larger freshwater fish, there's still more where they came from, including the largest freshwater fish Wade has ever caught.
"It took me nearly four hours from hooking it to actually clapping eyes on that thing," he says. "It was on the last day of fishing. We needed a big one of these fish and it was on the last day."
River Monsters airs every Sunday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Animal Planet.
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