Amazon Abyss – BBC

The awesome Amazon is wider and deeper at some points than the English Channel, flowing 6,500km across South America.

It’s famous for the surrounding rainforest, which can take visitors by surprise because it is not all thick tropical jungle. Watch what dive cameraman, Mike de Gruy, thought after his first trip to the river for the Amazon Abyss expedition.

You’d think TV crews would be hard-pressed to find any corner of the planet that hasn’t been filmed, but it turns out that in the Amazon rainforest there’s a habitat where no cameras have ventured: the river itself.
The reason is that the water’s so murky that diving into it is like taking a swim through a bowl of oxtail soup. But that doesn’t deter Kate Humble and friends.
In a vessel that looks like a Mississippi showboat they set out to capture the Amazon’s spooky wildlife. Every other creature here seems to have “giant” in its name – stingrays, otters, sponges and, most elusive of all, the giant catfish known as a “jau”, which has never been filmed.

Part One
Hunting for it in the piranha-infested waters looks like no fun at all, but some of the images we see of astonished fish along the way are brilliant.

Part Two
The team are on a quest to find a fish that talks and the candiru – a parasitic catfish notorious for invading the human body. Kate heads deep into the jungle to film a rare freshwater dolphin and track down the elusive giant otter.

Part Three
Mike and his team confront an armour-plated catfish, discover a 45-metre hole in the riverbed and come face to face with an anaconda.

Part Four
The team has come to the very deepest part of the jungle, where streams contain the richest life, as well as danger, from four-metre caiman and the electric eel – a fish with a 600 volt shock.

Part Five
In the climax of the expedition, the team prepares to explore a 100 metre chasm at the very bottom of the river. Underwater robots take cameras down the abyss and find the deep water flesh-feeding candiru.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/amazon/creatures.shtml

http://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Amazon_Abyss