Quotes from Jeremy Wade

I actually found contracting malaria in the Congo fascinating. Observing your body under attack from this microorganism and seeing how it responds is simultaneously fascinating and awful but maybe that's just because I'm a former biology teacher.

I have caught some big eels in New Zealand, where the climate is very similar to Scotland. But they grow to around five feet long.

Starting in my late 20s, I would go on one fishing trip a year to an exotic location. I went to India and caught what was essentially a giant carp. I went to Thailand and got myself arrested as a suspected spy. I went to the Congo and got malaria. But even the bad stuff is material.

I have feared for my life on fishing trips - I was once in a plane crash in the Amazon, for example, and I've been trapped in a sinking boat - but not when actually handling fish, although I have been injured by fish.

My background is very much tropical rainforests. We did a lot in the earlier series in places like the Amazon and the Congo. Almost as an antidote to that, I quite like more open, mountainous regions.

Sea water is clear and you can put the camera in sea water and you can see stuff, whereas freshwater is often zero visibility.

The arapaima, found in South America, has an elongated body and a head so bony that the male fish will sometimes kill each other with a nifty headbutt. It's believed to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world.

I've been in situations where if I'd been careless I could have been missing some fingers or a hand or something like that, or a very, very bad bleed or whatever.

I have caught eels from Loch Ness, as we did a River Monsters episode which started off there. They weren't very big - just 18 inches. I'm sure there may be bigger eels, but you're only talking about 10lbs.

With 'River Monsters,' it sometimes didn't matter if the story was made up or exaggerated.

The great thing about freshwater fish is most of them are incredibly ugly, a lot of them are, so no one can fail to look good next to some of these things.

The most fascinating and satisfying encounter so far was the goliath tigerfish of the Congo. I first caught one in 1991, and then again while filming the second season of 'River Monsters' in 2009. Its appearance is quite unbelievable, like a giant piranha, with inch-long interlocking teeth.

I've never caught muskie. That would be quite special.

There are some species, one was the Goliath Tigerfish, that took me six years to track down and catch.

Fishing as a spectator sport in real time is the most boring thing you can imagine.

Fish don't have hands; to investigate, they open their mouth, and sometimes it's someone's foot.

So even if there was a mutation in Loch Ness I still don't think you're going to see a 30ft eel.

I go to the Congo or the Amazon, but every river has its mystery of what is down there.

Being out on the water, you're very exposed. In the Amazon, one cause of death that's not uncommon is getting caught out in a storm. What people sometimes do is, they're out in the middle of the river, and the storm comes, so they go into the side of the river and a tree falls on top of them.

In an ideal world, you don't want creatures where they shouldn't be because there's always unintended consequences.

I like taking people to a world they wouldn't normally go to and to creatures that a lot of people didn't know existed.

Normally if you are in a boat, you can follow a fish around, but if you are on the shore, you have to pull it.

Normally, you want the river when the water is low and not when it's flooded. For example, there are parts of the Amazon where the water goes up to 15 meters high. This floods the forest, so a lot of the fish that normally stay close together are suddenly very hard to find.

The human mind doesn't like a vacuum. We will populate that vacuum with the contents of our own head, and often that's scary stuff.