Seeking The Truth About the Feared Piranha
While we talked, a man appeared on the bank across the river,
leading two horses to the water’s edge. In they waded, all three, and the
horses drank. Still holding the reins, the man jumped into a canoe and paddled
into midstream, his team swimming alongside. Our hostess caught my unspoken
thoughts, “Ah, but they are harmless, the piranhas out there,” she laughed,
“or do you think we have tamed them? Every morning two hundred of our cattle
swim across to grazing lands on the other side, and swim back at night.” She
suggested we move upriver a mile or so to a particular lagoon she had heard was
packed with treacherous piranhas. She spoke with authority, so we took to the
river again. When a dugout paddled by two ranchmen appeared coming toward us, we
met it bow to bow. Domingo's talked to the canoeists, and one of the pair hopped
aboard our canoe, agreeing to escort us.
Along the way we heard an uproar in the low trees along the bank, the kind of
noisy fussing that a troupe of monkeys makes. Domingo's abruptly beached the
canoe and before I could ask him questions, vanished into the jungle gloom,
armed with his single-barrel shotgun. With minutes I heard a shot, and almost at
once we were moving again, with a dead monkey in the bottom of the boat. Now I
understood that he planned to use it to bait the piranhas, in place of the stale
beef I had brought. Raised as a hunter, Domingo's considered monkeys fair game,
as hunters in other lands regard rabbits or squirrels. We veered off the main
river into a shallow tributary. Paddles took over from the outboard, and soon we
came to a forced halt. A swamp lay between the tributary and the lagoon we were
seeking, so we waded up onto the shore and dragged our boat across a stretch of
quagmire to one of those by-now-familiar dry-season lagoons, its secrets hidden
beneath a mucky green surface.
Only the bones remain. Photo substitute of a duck being devoured!
A sluggish brown stream turns into a rolling caldron as scores
of piranhas devour the carcass of a capybara, a creature whose four-foot maximum
length makes it the worlds’ largest rodent. Within three minutes the hungry
horde had stripped the flesh from the bones. Underwater close-up at lower left
reveals the fury of the feeding piranhas.
Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1914 book, Through the
Brazilian Wilderness, widely publicized the piranha’s ferocity.
Since then, infrequent but horrifying tales of men being devoured have built the
creature’s image into that of a monster. Some such stories may have been
embellished in their retelling. Noted anthropologist Harald Schultz spent two
decades roaming the Brazilian hinterland, and in that time met only seven
persons who had been injured by piranhas.
