It’s not every day you land a fish with what appears to be human teeth. But that’s what happened when fisherman Juan Gallo caught the Amazonian pacu fish in a duck pond in California earlier this year.
That’s right, the pacu fish’s teeth are said to resemble human teeth for being straighter and more angular and with a less noticeable overbite than its close relative, the aggressively carnivorous piranha.
According to The Independent, when Gallo brought the fish out of the water, it had managed to chew its way through the line with its set of super chompers! Although from the look of that picture, we’d say he might be overdue a check-up!
Matthew Gimlen, a freshwater fish expert at the Sacramento retailer Exotic Aquarium told The Independent that pacu fish are not native to the colder waters of northern California. However, they are sold in aquarium shops, and pacu are often released into ponds when owners realise they can no longer take care of them.
Although pacu fish do eat meat and are related to piranhas, they are not flesh-eating monsters, as has often been mistakenly reported. Instead, they prefer to feed on fruit, seeds and nuts. But their impressive jaw clenching ability means the pacu still poses a danger to humans.
In 2004, an 18-month-old toddler needed plastic surgery to repair a wound when a pacu bit her finger at Edinburgh’s Butterfly World. Speaking at the time of the event, James Barnes, managing director for the centre, commented, “This is actually a Pacu, which our staff have nicknamed a ‘Banana Piranha’ as they feed it slices of banana”.
According to Matthew Kane, the zoological manager of Deep Sea World, Fife, who is experienced in looking after pacu fish, “Pacus will eat anything, even children’s wiggling fingers.” He continued, “It’s just their natural behaviour. The fish don’t know what they are eating until they take a bite.”
Ouch! That’s not a set of teeth our dentists would like to work on!
Photo credit: Nisamanee wanmoon – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35460603
