History Series / RiverMonsters

* DoingItForTheArt: He very rarely kills the fish (or eats them), usually letting them go and even giving them a few minutes' rest if they need it. This serves as an extreme TechnicalPacifist stance, since some of these fish are known to kill or maim people (some of them ''intentionally'' hunting people out), and all of them come close to killing ''him''. [[invoked]]
** In the Nile Perch episode, he risked crocodile attack while holding a captured perch by the boat so that it could recover before being released.
** During his fishing trip into Chernobyl, Jeremy was shown to be quite conflicted about catching a radioactively contaminated fish for science to dissect.

* LandDownUnder: Jeremy has been to Australia on three occasions (once for bull sharks, once for a saw fish and once for a relatively rare type of shark that was only recently identified). Not as often as you'd think though given Australia's reputation, but we just don't have much in the way of the big river systems to generate the diversity found elsewhere.

* NatureDocumentary: Sadly, it's one of the few examples of this type of show that Animal Planet still airs on a regular basis. Ironically, this might explain its high popularity as well.

* {{Retool}}: In Season 8, the show's focus will shift from freshwater fish to marine life.

* NuclearNasty: {{Subverted|Trope}} - while the Wels Catfish Jeremy caught in "Atomic Assassin" is irradiated (it was ''swimming in the cooling pond for the Chernobyl Nuclear Powerplant''), it's actually ''underweight'' for its age, on account of all the radiation it absorbed.

* {{Gorn}}: Several episodes have shown images of people with horrific injuries inflicted by the fish Jeremy's searching for. Taken UpToEleven in a couple of the South American episodes showing autopsy photos of human bodies half-eaten by piranhas and candiru-acu.

* AllMythsAreTrue: Played with. A major theme in the series is how fish and other aquatic animals have inspired sea monster stories around the world, even if the monsters themselves don't literally exist.

* AllMythsAreTrue: Played with. He goes out of his way to show where the myths come from, as he believes they all have roots in truth.

* EverythingsEvenWorseWithSharks: Bull sharks, as he investigates, are not only capable of hunting in fresh water, but seem to be actively moving inland for the chance to dominate new territories and feeding grounds, including Australian golf course water hazards and Florida suburbs.

* FiendishFish: Jeremy Wade tries to hunt down the aquatic creatures responsible for RealLife accidents, human deaths and/or legends around the globe. And you'll soon find out that many, ''many'' fishes can be dangerous, intentionally or not.

** Another Season 8 episode has him investigating "El Diablo Rojo" from the Mexican coast, which turn out to be Humboldt Squid -- one of the largest and most vicious predatory squids around, and who travel in deadly packs that can easily butcher humans.

** The candiru; a parasitic catfish that normally targets the gills of other fish, but has been known to embed itself in the genitals of luckless humans relieving themselves in South American waterways [[note]]while the show treats this as true, other experts disagree, and the story told of the candiru that was allegedly extracted from a man's penis is inconsistent as it shows an intact fish that it claims was the one removed while simultaneously claiming that the fish had to be cut to pieces by a surgeon in order to get it out. Recent research has also shown that the candiru hunts by sight and isn't attracted to the scent of urine[[/note]].

* NatureDocumentary: Sadly, it's one of the few animal-focused shows that Animal Planet still airs on a regular basis. Ironically, this might explain its high popularity as well.

** In "Amazon Flesheaters", Jeremy interviews a man who has had an [[UnderStatement unpleasant encounter with a candiru]] and [[{{Squick}} shows video of the removal surgery]].

* GreatWhiteHunter: Jeremy Wade is essentially a TechnicalPacifist, fish-based version of the trope.

* HeWhoMustNotBeSeen: Several episodes have had peoples' faces blurred out, most notably Ukrainian military personnel manning checkpoints in the Chernobyl episode.
* HeroicDolphin: Averted on a grand scale with the Amazon river dolphins. They eat piranhas, gang up on bull sharks, often are battle-scarred, and have caused serious injuries or even deaths. River dolphins actually have a fearsome reputation among locals as river-based members of TheFairFolk for precisely this reason.

** In Season 5, he provides a rational explanation that some sightings of the Loch Ness Monster could be due to Greenland Sharks that have come up into the loch from the sea to feed on spawning salmon, though he fails to demonstrate that Greenland sharks actually do this.
** Also in Season 5, he investigates two mythical Japanese river monsters; the giant catfish that causes earthquakes is debunked as just a large catfish that becomes very agitated because its SuperSenses let it sense incoming earthquakes, but the Kappa is probably the Japanese Giant River Salamander, which grows big enough to ''eat children'' (though there are no actual reports of this happening).

** In one episode, he hypothesized that some disappearances in South America could have been the result of people being preyed upon by green anacondas.
* SwampMonster: The real life series revolves around Jeremy Wade travelling the world hunting for monstrous fish that are reported in various rivers, often in swamp-like locations.

* UkrainiansWithDepletedUranium: Jeremy had to pass through several checkpoints manned by Ukrainian military personnel in the Chernobyl episode.

* InfantImmortality: Averted. Several episodes involve the deaths of young children, who are much more vulnerable to attack because of their small size, inability to swim, or naivete to the dangers that might lurk in local rivers. The most infamous was a girl bitten in half and partially eaten by a goliath tigerfish.

* AdmiringTheAbomination: Like [[Series/CrocodileHunter Steve Irwin]] and [[Series/TheJeffCorwinExperience Jeff Corwin]] before him, Jeremy clearly has a lot of respect and admiration for all of the fish that he catches, including those that have been demonized by humans and the media.

''River Monsters'' is an Creator/AnimalPlanet series hosted by Jeremy Wade, a British biologist/extreme angler/writer/TV presenter/[[OverlyLongGag specialist in natural history]], and produced by Bristol's Icon Films. The series began in April 2009 to the best series premiere in Animal Planet's history, most likely because it features a BadassGrandpa looking for [[TheCatfish monstrous freshwater fish]]. It is an extremely potent dose of NightmareFuel due to that last part.

* BadassGrandpa:
** Jeremy Wade is over sixty-years-old, and he ''hunts out'' fish that can reach twice his weight in [[DeathWorld dangerous conditions]] like at the base of a waterfall, during lulls in border conflicts, surrounded by bears, crocodiles and hippopotamuses, whatever else is hiding in the tropical rainforests near both the Amazon and Congo Rivers, or on the icy waters of an Alaskan lake. He's also suffered numerous injuries and even survived a ''plane crash'' and is [[TheDeterminator still going]]!
** A few of the fishermen he goes to for advice on catching the fish that he is going after are at least past their fifties and have been catching these fish—sometimes without bait or tackle—in some of the most dangerous rivers and lakes in the world for ''decades''.

* HeroicDolphin: Averted on a grand scale with the Amazon river dolphins. They eat piranhas, gang up on bull sharks, often are battle-scarred, and have caused serious injuries or even deaths.

* FiendishFish: Jeremy Wade tries to hunt down the aquatic creatures responsible for RealLife accidents, human deaths and/or legends around the globe. And you'll soon find out that many, ''many'' fishes can be dangerous.

* EverythingsSquishierWithCephalopods:
** In Season 8, he hypothesizes that the mysterious Lusca of the Caribbean may actually be an undiscovered species of giant octopus living in the Blue Holes, a twenty-plus foot giant that would be more than capable of devouring humans, based on the predatory skill of smaller species.
** Another Season 8 episode has him investigating "El Diablo Rojo" from the Mexican coast, which turn out to be Humboldt Squid -- one of the largest and most vicious predatory squids around, and who travel in deadly packs that can easily butcher humans.

* StockNessMonster: Averted in the fifth season's special episode on Lock Ness; Jeremy, early on, attends a historical museum in Glasgow and notes that while the plesiosaur is the iconic form for "Nessie", the fact that it was an air-breather makes it highly unlikely that it wouldn't have been seen discovered by now, given how much activity goes on and around the lake in the modern era. Furthermore, as a scientist who has been studying Loch Ness notes further on into the films, Loch Ness itself didn't exist until glaciers gouged it out of the rock some ten thousand years ago -- making it far too young to house surviving dinosaurs. By the episode's end, all of the evidence that Jeremy has gathered, including testimony from actual locals who purport to have seen Nessie and invariably describe as simply "a large hump" rather than the iconic long-necked or snake-like form, leads him to conclude that the Loch Ness Monster (or at least some sightings of it) is most likely a rare sighting of a Greenland Shark that has swum up into the loch in pursuit of salmon. Greenland sharks don't habitually live in fresh water the way bull sharks do, but have been recorded [[https://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Animals/Archives/2009/Rare-Finds.aspx in the St. Lawrence River]], making this at least possible.

!!"Trope on! Trope on!":

!!This series provides examples of the following:

* LightningBruiser: Nearly every river monster in the show. Special note regarding arapaima, which grow to 10 feet long and 500 pounds but launch themselves several yards into the air when provoked to ram their human attackers, sometimes to fatal effect.
* MasterOfAll: Jeremy describes the goliath tigerfish as this. It deserves that reputation.

** Don't wade into an arapaima nest either if you want to avoid being hit by several hundred pounds of solid bone and muscle.