Icelandic Giants is the first episode of the first season of Jeremy Wade's Unknown Waters.
Episode Summary[]
Jeremy Wade’s fishing adventure through Iceland’s river systems in search of the elusive Atlantic salmon, a fish that even he has never caught before.
Episode Description[]
Jeremy Wade is in Iceland, trying to catch the Atlantic Salmon, a fish that is becoming rarer and rarer each year. They have an annual migration where they return to Icelandic rivers that they were born in, and their numbers in that area have remained consistent for thousands of years, despite their numbers plummeting in other places. Jeremy wants to find out the answers as to why.
While fishing, Jeremy accidentally hooks and pulls in a larger Atlantic Cod, a predator of young salmon. He notes that they are a hungry predator in the area, though not as formidable as others. He returns it and continues fishing. Immediately afterwards, he hooks yet another predator, more dangerous than the last, an Atlantic Wolf Fish, known locally as the 'steinbitur' or stone biter. It too is an accidental catch although it is one of the top predators in the area.
Jeremy has a chat with a man in a bar who says that in the mid-80s the population of Atlantic Salmon started to decline slightly when the commercial fishing industry gained a big foothold. The locals still work to protect the salmon. At the docks, Jeremy sees lots and lots of fish being brought in, even by the small boats, as over a million tons of fish are harvested yearly. The majority of fish are Atlantic Cod, and interestingly, no Atlantic Salmon are being brought in, this is because commercial fishing for Salmon is not allowed.
Jeremy goes back to his original question of how the Atlantic Salmon have survived in the region stably while other places have dipping populations. The salmon live in small mountain rivers when they are born and then go to the fjord, and return there to spawn. Jeremy heads to one of these streams in order to try and catch a salmon, with his experienced guide, Matti. He has to fly fish and release all his catches (which he anyways does) because salmon are protected in most of Iceland's rivers.
Jeremy isn't tempting the salmon with food, he's trying to trigger a territorial response as salmon stop feeding as they get older. His first try is unsuccessful as he accidentally pulls the hook out of the fish's mouth. He continues fishing but doesn't get bites for some time. Thus he and his guide change location, and then see a large salmon in the stream. He hooks it, but once again it gets off, despite the guide saying that the timing and hook was perfect. Jeremy continues having problems with fly fishing, as he keeps making different technique errors and keeps getting frustrated.
Jeremy decides to turn his sights to a new problem. Since salmon keep coming back to the same river that they were born in, how did they originally get to Icelandic, a land that is potentially dangerous to live in? Jeremy goes to a glacial lagoon which used used to be covered by glaciers just 50 years ago, but have now melted. He learns that previously, all of Iceland used to be like this lagoon, covered in a sheet of ice which melted thousands of years ago, allowing Salmon to arrive. This lagoon is a sample of how fjords looked in the area 10 thousand years ago.
Jeremy meets up with a scientist that is studying the same question as him, how the salmon first arrived in Iceland. He and Jeremy lay out a net trying to see if they can intercept any salmon that are coming through. However, he wonders why the salmon would come to a new river if they weren't born there. The scientist explains that they aren't perfect, and frequently come over to a wrong river, and the unoriented salmon, called "strayers" stray away from their regular route and create new populations. So, it is the success of the fish that get lost that are crucial to the species as a whole, colonizing new rivers. DNA analysis shows that the first salmon in Icelandic swam up from mainland Europe. If it wasn't for that small percentage, salmon wouldn't be in Iceland at all.
Checking their nets, Jeremy and the scientist find that they are catching lots of sea trout, but no salmon. The trout are actually migrating brown trout that swam out to sea, and the closest species to the atlantic salmon. Except for the fact that the salmon are larger, the trout and salmon are virtually identical. Since they are so similar the trout are crucial to research for both itself and salmon. The trout are doing similar things to the things salmon did thousands of years ago, which was colonizing Iceland's rivers.
Having mostly solved this, Jeremy turns his sights to the Greenland Shark, a predator who has been in Iceland's waters for even longer than salmon and trout. He meets up with a man who catches them frequently. Greg Bjorvenson has been hunting Greenland Shark for over 60 years. He shows Jeremy some of his gear, and says that his largest catch was a ton. He hunts them for shark meat.
He heads to an Icelandic dam, and on one side, there is a river that used to be a giant glacial river, but because of the dam it has become a lot smaller into a slight stream. However, some of this water has gone to a different channel, creating a river that has perfect conditions of salmon. The new river is a lot better for salmon to go through.
Jeremy sees some captive small salmon owned by a naturalist who is trying to get salmon into the new river, since the dam recently came. Now these salmon will come back to breed in this river, and will colonize it for many generations. Jeremy and the naturalist are giving nature a helping hand by getting more salmon into these rivers.
The naturalist believes that the salmon he has been releasing for about 5 years now have been returning to the river as adults. Jeremy Wade believes that he needs to see this for himself. Jeremy begins fishing in order to see if he can catch any of the salmon. If indeed they are coming back as adults, he will know they are captive bred released ones because otherwise there would be no adult salmon in the river.
This time, Jeremy manages to get a bite. He manages to pull it in with ease. It is an adult Atlantic Salmon, fresh from the sea. It is undoubtedly one that was manually released into the river, and has now come back to breed in the same place of its birth. It has spent just a year at sea, and now has come back. It is a healthy male, which is a good sign. This means that the salmon are beginning to colonize the new river. Jeremy would still like to catch a healthy female with a lot of eggs too, as a sign that breeding is going well in Iceland.
Now Jeremy goes to a place called Lake Thingvatlavatan, a lake between 2 tectonic plates constantly moving apart. It is a very deep lake, 400 feet at some points. This water has a collection of giant fish congregated in one area. Jeremy begins fishing, and after constantly casting and waiting for many hours, he gets a bite. He catches a small arctic char, a good catch but not the fish he's after. However, as the day turns into night, Jeremy hooks onto a large fish, and is struggling to keep it on the line, and unfortunately, it comes off due to not enough line on the reel.
Jeremy gets a bigger reel, and then continues fishing. Early into the morning, he gets another bite. It is the same fish, an extremely fast type, and in a few seconds a hundred yards of line are gone from the reel. However, Jeremy was ready and his reel doesn't run out this time. Jeremy then manages to stop it and start pulling it in. It is undoubtedly a large and powerful fish. Jeremy still manages to pull it in. It is a giant brown trout. In this lake, the trout have no predators, which allows them to grow to a massive size. They can grow up to 3 feet tall, and Jeremy's is quite a lot larger than 2 and a half feet.
However, this is still not the fish he is after. He goes to the river Laxa, a river said to be the home of giant Icelandic Salmon. However, 50 years ago, there was an idea to dam the river. This would threaten farmland and wipe out the salmon population. They didn't decide to gauge the impacts on the local people and fish. However, some local farmers decided to stop them by packing the dam with dynamite. They ended up blowing the dam up, and thanks to their refusal to give evidence about the explosion, it was not possible to get legal charges against them.
After learning about the story of how the salmon were saved, Jeremy decides to go and fish himself. Jeremy casts everywhere into the river, but he doesn't seem to be getting any bites. He decides to turn in for the night and keep fishing early in the morning. The next time he goes fishing, Jeremy gets a strong bite. The fish keeps jumping into the water, trying to get free. He slowly manages to bring it in, and his guide nets it. It is a large female, carrying 8,000 eggs. This brings Jeremy's journey to a successful conclusion, as he now knows that salmon are healthy in Icelandic rivers.
Animals Featured[]
- Atlantic Salmon
- Atlantic Cod
- Atlantic Wolf Fish
- Greenland Shark
Locations Featured[]
- Iceland
Trivia[]
- In the River Monsters episode Legend of Loch Ness, a fish mentioned was the 'steinbitur' or stone biter, but it was not confirmed as to what the true identity was, although it has been conjectured to be a wolf fish. In this episode, Wade actually caught the fish unlike earlier, and confirmed the wolf fish is indeed the stone biter.
- This episode took place in Iceland due to the nation, at the time of filming, being one of the foremost nations in the world in terms of COVID limitation.