The author of "River Monsters: True Stories of the Ones that Didn't Get Away" is back with some new scary fish tales for the fifth season of his popular Animal Planet series "River Monsters."
This season, Jeremy Wade is upping the ante in his mission to find the world's most mysterious and dangerous fish. His exploration includes the search for a mutant fish in Chernobyl’s nuclear wastelands. This morning Wade joins “Starting Point” to discuss the treacherous new heights of adventure.
As he explored Chernobyl’s nuclear wastelands, Wade says he was “very concerned” about the radiation levels and therefore consulted several experts beforehand. He says he and his team were told there was a total limit that they could not exceed and were limited to five consecutive days in the region.
"I had an alarm that told me if [the radiation] was particularly high," Wade says. "Some places if I stood there for say an hour, I would have exceeded my dose. I would have had to go out.” Wade says the region is still an excluded zone for which you need permission to get in and unlike anywhere that he had ever visited.
“The scientists actually wanted a fish that he could study because it hasn't been done,” says Wade. Wade says viewers should expect a dramatic ending to the program during the season finale.
Viewers can catch next week's episode of "River Monsters" in the waters near Chernobyl on Sunday at 9PM ET on Animal Planet.
That sounds like it was a tense episode to film. I love River Monsters, but I work Sunday nights at DISH, so I used to miss a lot of episodes. Now I have a DISH Hopper DVR and its set to record this whole season; I decided to take advantage of the 2000 hours of recording space by having my Hopper record all of the past River Monster episodes as well.