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Thread: Piranha cousin hooked in Passaic

  1. #1
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    Default Piranha cousin hooked in Passaic

    BY RICHARD COWEN
    STAFF WRITER
    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.


    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.



  2. #2
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    This comes up every once in a while. Pacu have been caught from time to time. Funny little thing, well maybe not so funny, is that they eat nuts. They have decimated the amazon river as an invasive species. Since they have eaten everything in site they have been known to bit the 'nuts' of nude male swimmers OUCH!!!!

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    Quote Originally Posted by J Barbosa View Post
    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.
    .


    They call those round teeth? Still look nasty to me. Nice pic. That's one thing I would not want to catch.

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    4' long would be a real problem. Is is just me or do those look like human teeth?

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    They were on river monsters and no BS like Rob said are noted for attacking the testicles on bathers in the amazon. DS please test this rumor for me

    Pay attention to what history has taught us or be prepared to relive it again

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    I had one of those in my fish tank it bit a hole in my Oscars head.
    Cranky Old Bassturd.

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    Quote Originally Posted by finchaser View Post
    They were on river monsters and no BS like Rob said are noted for attacking the testicles on bathers in the amazon. DS please test this rumor for me
    The next time I'm living in my car for the weekend trying to chase down a bite, and don't have the chance to wash up all the body parts.....I'm gonna grab ya in a great big bear hug when I see ya.....and let you get to smell what a fishing nomad smells like....

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    Dude that is disgusting! Hope you know they outlawed cruel and unusual punishment in the USA.

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    X2, come on dark be reasonable have some compassion for the guy. If you smell that bad there should be a law against it.
    thanks for the artilcle JB. Saw that on river monsters something about penis eating fish. Glad they can't survive around here.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by J Barbosa View Post
    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.
    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.
    A bear hug from DS himself? Waterboarding in Guatanamo would be more humane.
    I think some folks might confuse the pacu with the candiru when it comes to the nut sack stories.

    Here is a description of the candiru.
    Candiru

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Jump to: navigation, search
    Not to be confused with Carandiru (disambiguation).
    Candiru
    Vandellia cirrhosa
    Scientific classification
    Kingdom: Animalia
    Phylum: Chordata
    Class: Actinopterygii
    Order: Siluriformes
    Superfamily: Loricarioidea
    Family: Trichomycteridae
    Genus: Vandellia
    Species: V. cirrhosa
    Binomial name
    Vandellia cirrhosa
    Valenciennes, 1846

    Candiru (English and Portuguese or candir? in Spanish), Vandellia cirrhosa, also known as ca?ero, toothpick fish, or vampire fish, is a species of parasitic freshwater catfish in the family Trichomycteridae native to the Amazon Basin where it is found in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
    The definition of candiru differs between authors. The word has been used to refer to only Vandellia cirrhosa, the entire genus Vandellia, the subfamily Vandelliinae, or even the two subfamilies Vandelliinae and Stegophilinae.[1][2][3][4]
    Although some candiru species have been known to grow to a size of 40 centimetres (16 in) in length, others are considerably smaller. These smaller species are known for an alleged tendency to invade and parasitise the human urethra; however, despite ethnological reports dating back to the late 19th century,[5] the first documented case of the removal of a candiru from a human urethra did not occur until 1997, and even that incident has remained a matter of controversy.



    Whatever, I would not want to handle that fish its nasty looking. Jb cool article. thanks for sharing.

  11. #11
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    LOL. You never know what you might find opening one of these threads. There are also people who let there goldfish go, and they turn into giant 10lb mudsuckers rooting up the bottom and making the water dirty.

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