Yesterday I wrote for ScienceNOW about how piranhas got their pointy teeth. The main thing I learned about piranhas is, really, they aren’t that bad. I talked to two people who have spent a lot of time catching piranhas in the wild and neither has been bitten, other than a little friendly snapping when the piranha was already out of the water. One had a friend who was bitten, though, and it was kind of nasty – the fish took out a chunk of flesh and the guy had to go to the hospital.

I was writing about this guy, Megapiranha – he’s a 3-foot-long extinct piranha relative with interesting teeth. (If you are a person who is interested in piranha evolution.)

Also totally cool: the pacus, which are related to piranhas and look a lot like them, but don’t eat meat. To quote John Lundberg, one of the ichthyologists I talked to: “They really are frugivores. It’s pretty amazing. The pacus that are in the Amazon and Orinoco, they’ll go into flooded forests during the high water season and they’ll wait underneath fruit trees that are coming into maturity. They’ll just hang out. The fruits drop into the water and they float away. Of course the fishermen see that and they fish with fruit.”

Isn’t that funny? Forget nightcrawlers, somebody get this fish a nice juicy piece o’ fruit. He says he watched fishermen in Suriname take a really long pole and put a piece of fruit on the end – something that looks kind of like a kiwi – and slap the fruit on the water. The pacus totally go for it.

art copyright Ray Troll, 2005