Piranha cousin hooked in Passaic
THE RECORD
Tom Boylan knows fishing. Last year, the 77-year-old retired bus driver caught 892 carp at Passaic?s Third Ward Veterans Memorial Park in almost daily trips to the lake.
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CHRIS MONROE / SPECIAL TO THE RECORD
Tom Boylan of Passaic with the pacu he caught in Third Ward Park. The fish, native to the Amazon, is considered an invasive species.
But nothing could have prepared him for the strange fish he hooked on Saturday. The 10-inch creature looked like a piranha, but it didn?t have its sharp teeth. Instead, it had rounded teeth, and an orange belly and fins that were unlike anything Boylan had ever seen.
?I would say ?shocked? is a good way to describe how I felt,? he said on Monday.
After he stashed the strange catch in the freezer at his Passaic apartment on Saturday, Absolutely Fish ? an aquarium supply store in Clifton ? solved the mystery the next day. It was ID?d as a pacu, a gentler cousin of the piranha that, like the piranha, is native to the Amazon region of South America and had no business being in Third Ward Park.
?Most likely, someone had it in their fish tank and it grew too big, so they dumped it,? said Pat Egan, manager at Absolutely Fish. ?We call them ?tank busters.? We don?t even sell them because they grow so big.?
Although legal to own, pacus tend to grow up to 4 feet long, which is way too large for a fish tank, Egan said.
Boylan, who says he?s fished all over, from Canada to Alabama, usually knows what to expect when he drops a line in the water. He studies species and their habits, makes his own lures and chooses the bait. Yet he knows all that work gives him, at best, a fighting chance to land a fish.
But throw all that preparation out the window when an invader from the Amazon is lurking in the shallow depths at Third Ward Park.
?That probably would have been the last fish I expected to catch down there,? he said.
Unlike the piranha, which has been known to attack humans, the pacu uses its rounded teeth ? which are similar to those of a human ? to chomp on vegetation and nuts that fall from trees into the water. Yet the pacu?s close relation to the piranha, and its taste for nuts, has recently given the fish a bad rap on the Internet.
[FONT=Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif]A pacu sighting off the coast of Denmark last month prompted a government scientist to issue a tongue-in-cheek warning: Male swimmers should keep their bathing suits firmly tied because the fish occasionally mistakes testicles for tree nuts.
The scientist, Peter Rask Moller of the Copenhagen Museum of Natural History, later backed off the warning, saying he was half-joking. But CNN picked up on the story, and it went global.
?We did say that we recommend men to keep their swimsuits tied up until we know if there are more pacus out there in our waters,? Moller told CNN by email. ?Of course, this is half a joke since it is very unlikely that you would actually meet one here and that it would bite you. It?s up to people themselves how careful they want to be. I?ll keep my shorts on, though.?
Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the state gets ?a couple? of reports of pacu sightings a year. Although they are an invasive species, pacus are not considered a potential problem because their survival is unlikely when the water turns colder, he said.
Still, Hajna said the pacu didn?t belong in Third Ward Park and said it was best that the fish was removed. ?The man did the right thing by removing him from the environment,? Hajna said.
