By the author of Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time

Swimming with piranhas

One morning in my mid-life crisis, when I had considered and rejected the thrill-seeking possibilities of nude skydiving or drag-racing on a mountain road in a red Corvette convertible, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to go for a swim in a tankful of hungry piranhas at feeding time.

Soon after I was standing in the dark in front of the piranha tank at the Dallas Aquarium, surrounded by seven-year-olds excitedly telling one another how quickly piranhas can reduce a human being to bloody stew. One of the boys was lashing his head from side-to-side, teeth bared. Then a couple of others joined in, swarming around me.

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The aquarium's piranhas were bigger than I expected, some nearly a foot in length, and there were 40 of them in an area not much larger than a hot tub. They were pugnacious looking creatures with their lower jaws thrust forward, like bulldogs in silver body stockings.

It occurred to me that my employer of the moment, National Geographic Television, had inexplicably chosen to pay me through a temp agency. Then I climbed up onto the rim of the tank, where a former curator and piranha buff named David Schleser was waiting to give me a primer.

In some parts of their range, he told me, piranhas are also known as capaburro. Schleser waited till we were both about neck-deep in the piranha tank, and then he added, “It means donkey castrator."

The candiru leg-cross

Later, Schleser and I went down to Peru to swim with piranhas and collect fish in the wild.

One day, our nets produced a slithery, eel-like little catfish with no pectoral fins or dorsal spines. Schleser identified it as the notorious candiru, which typically swims into the gills of other fish, latches on, and pierces a gill artery to feed on the blood.

The candiru is also reputed to enter the genital region of anybody dumb enough not merely to swim in the Amazon, but to urinate while doing so. When I held the candiru in my hand, it dug in with two little spines projecting down from either side of its mouth.

The lore is that it uses these spines like pitons for climbing up the urethra. (This is the point in the story where you cross your legs.) I put the fish in a barrel of water and thought about putting a part of my anatomy in with it, but forebore.

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