Face Ripper is the first episode of the fifth season of River Monsters.
Episode Description[]
Jeremy investigates his most disturbing case yet: the story of a man who had his face ripped off in a remote Bolivian river. The journey through dangerous jungle ends with a confrontation with one of his oldest adversaries.
Episode Summary[]
When a story surfaces of a man in Bolivia who had his face ripped off by something in the water, Jeremy Wade ventures deep into the South American jungle to find out what kind of horrible monster could be capable of this.
Casting his line out, he catches nothing but piranha, but his previous experiments in Season 1 proved that piranha won't attack unless under special circumstances, so he immediately dismisses them as the culprit.
But then, an interview with the doctor who performed the post-mortem on the victim reveals piranhas as the culprits. Intrigued by this change in behaviour, Jeremy assumes it must be some new species.
Travelling to a flooded forest, he is once again surprised to find black piranha, which are usually solitary hunters, engaging in very aggressive pack behaviour.
Jeremy assumes these newly aggressive black piranha must be the culprit, until an interview with a witness reveals that it was red bellied piranhas that ate the man's face.
As this goes against his previous findings on piranha behaviour, Jeremy suspects that there must be some introduced predator in the river system that is making the piranha turn to man-eating tendencies. Investigating, Jeremy finds himself once again going face to face with what is perhaps his greatest adversary.
Animals Featured[]
Locations Featured[]
- TBA
Trivia[]
- In an online interview conducted in 2020, Jeremy Wade said that once while filming in Bolivia, he looked through someone's window and saw them watching Demon Fish. It is largely believed that it was during the filming of this episode that it happened since this is the only episode to take place mostly in Bolivia.