RM - Face Ripper

In the last episode of S5, JW revisits his old haunt of South America (SA in the future) to discover that the piranhas, whom he dismissed as relatively harmless scavengers and small-scale carnivores in the very first episode of the enture series of River Monsters have turned dangerous, and are attacking and killed both humans and their livestock (i.e. horses).

Why? Because of the arapaimas, another S1 character. Those fish tower over the piranhas (and most other SA fish, I wager) and eat not only the piranhas proper, but also their food - other fish. As a result, the local piranhas have become 'meaner and leaner' than ever before and are going after much larger prey with devastating results...

What can be said about this revelation? In the same S1 episode JW had personally discovered that while piranhas can ignore people as food items most of the time, they still are quite capable of killing and eating people if the conditions are right without any arapaimas being involved. Yes, piranhas are just predators and nature's clean-up crew members, but like any predators - from sharks to alligators to bears and lions - they can turn onto humans and their livestock, kill and eat them. The only thing different is that individually piranhas are small enough to be harmless to humans, that's all.

And speaking of humans... Human-created places such as slaughterhouses, cemeteries, battlefields, etc that dump their waste into fresh water or are regularly flooded by it are also places were the piranhas are especially hungry for the warm-blooded flesh (fish themselves are cold-blooded, remember?) Here we see no such place, but JW himself mentioned the local organized drug trafficking and the frequent disposal of human corpses in the rivers. Such action just fuels the piranhas familiarity with human flesh and its taste and makes them ever more dangerous for people.

Why didn't JW follow this course and instead stuck with the arapaima angle? Hello! He is a specialist in river monsters (fish, occasional giant salamander and caiman), not human monsters, who are much more dangerous and monstrous. The good doctor from the episode said that Oscar (the deceased human of this episode) was killed by piranhas without any evidence of foul play? Fair enough, it's back to the fish!

And I can't begrudge JW anything. If Oscar was killed by foul play, then it's up to the police to sort it out, not JW.

As for the episode itself, it was quite decent, save for slight overabundance of flashbacks from the previous seasons. Ah well, it was still quite educational, as fas as RM episodes go.

So - a decent episode with some new information (I, for one, didn't know that the arapaimas were introduced to Bolivia, for example) and without any particular drawbacks. I give it 4.5 stars out of five.