Many unique animals live in the waters of the great South American Amazon River. Among them - a five-meter pyraruku (or arapaima), reaching 200 kilograms of weight; a two-meter electric eel that knocks a person down with a 300 volt current discharge; huge river rays with a deadly spike on their tail; blind dolphins living inland at a distance of 1500 kilometers from the ocean and terrifying crocodiles
The life features of many inhabitants of the river are still unknown. There is almost no information about peiche-do-mato fish. Noticing that the branch of the river where she lives begins to dry up, the fish leaves it and, moving for a long time through the forests, reaches another, more full-flowing branch, thanks to an unerring instinct and a respiratory system capable of adapting to the air environment.
More is known about a small but voracious beast - the piranha fish. She is the cause of the endless concern of local residents. They tell how a fisherman, sitting in a canoe, suddenly found himself without fingers, with his hand overboard; like a cow crossing a river was gnawed to the bone; how piranhas gutted an unwary swimmer, etc. The famous naturalist of the last century, Alexander Humboldt, spoke of piranhas as one of the greatest disasters in South America. And the famous ichthyologist George Myers wrote: “Her teeth are so sharp, and her jaws are so strong that she can cut off a piece of meat from a person or even from a crocodile just as smoothly as a razor, and her finger and bone together as instantly as a butcher's knife.
The piranha, called by scientists natterichs, has silvery sides and a yellow belly, and large bulging eyes, a blunt nose with a protruding lower jaw full of razor-sharp triangle teeth, make this fish, some specimens of which weigh more than four kilograms, remarkably similar on the bulldog.
A dozen or two of its varieties, differing in head shape, color, size and temperament, are found in tropical Latin America. They can be found wherever there is running or standing fresh water. Piranhas have a keen sense of smell and therefore smell blood or raw meat from afar.
The manner of hunting inherent in piranha is also unusual (by the way, sharks seem to behave): having stumbled upon a victim, she instantly rushes at it and cuts off a piece of meat; swallowing it, it immediately bites into the body again. Similarly, piranha attacks any prey.
However, the piranha itself sometimes falls into someone else's mouth. In the rivers of America, she has many enemies: large predatory fish, caimans, herons, river dolphins and freshwater turtles matamata, which are also dangerous to humans. All of them, before swallowing the piranha, try to bite it more painfully in order to check if it is still alive. “Swallowing a live piranha is like putting a working circular saw into your stomach,” notes American journalist Roy Sasser. Piranha is not the prophet Jonah, ready to patiently rest in the belly of a whale: it begins to bite and can kill the predator that caught it.
As already mentioned, the piranha has an excellent sense of smell - it smells blood in the water from afar. As soon as the bloody bait is thrown into the water, piranhas float from all ends of the river. However, we must not forget that the inhabitants of the Amazon and its tributaries can only rely on the sense of smell. The water in these rivers is so muddy that you can't see anything ten centimeters away. All that remains is to sniff or listen to the prey. The sharper the sense of smell, the higher the chances of surviving
Piranha's hearing is also excellent. The wounded fish flounder desperately, generating high frequency waves. The piranhas catch them and swim towards the source of this sound.
However, piranhas cannot be called "insatiable killers" for a long time. The English zoologist Richard Fox placed 25 goldfish in a pool where two piranhas were swimming. He expected that predators would soon kill all victims, like wolves that entered the sheepfold. However, piranhas killed only one goldfish for two per day, fraternally dividing it in half. They did not deal with the victims for nothing, but killed only to eat. However, they also did not want to miss the rich prey - a school of golden fish. Therefore, on the very first day, piranhas bit their fins. Now helpless fish, unable to swim on their own, swayed in the water like floats - tail up, head down. They were a living food supply for the hunters. From day to day, they chose a new victim and, slowly, ate it.
In their homeland, these predators are real orderlies of the rivers (remember that wolves are also called orderlies of the forest). When the rivers overflow during the rainy season and whole sections of the forest are hidden under water, many animals do not have time to escape. Thousands of corpses roll on the waves, threatening to poison all living things around with their poison and cause an epidemic. If it were not for the agility of the piranhas, eating these carcasses white to the bone, then people would die from seasonal epidemics in Brazil.
And not only seasonal! Twice a month, at new and full moon, a particularly strong ("syzygy") tide begins: the waters of the Atlantic rush into the interior of the continent, rushing up the river beds. The Amazon begins to flow backwards, spilling over from the banks. Considering that every second the Amazon dumps up to 200 thousand cubic meters of water into the ocean, it is easy to imagine which wall of water is rolling back. The river flows for kilometers. The consequences of these regular floods can be felt even 700 kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon. Small animals die from them again and again. Piranhas, like kites, cleanse the entire area of carrion, which otherwise would rot for a long time in the water. In addition, piranhas exterminate injured and sick animals, making the populations of their victims healthy.
There are two dozen of its varieties, differing in the shape of the head, color, size and temperament, found in tropical Latin America. They can be found wherever there is running or standing fresh water. Piranhas have a keen sense of smell and therefore smell blood or raw meat from afar. Gathering in flocks, they attack the victim. Some of them prefer deep pools, others prefer echoing rifts. Some are looking for calm backwaters, others for fast rapids. Some are very ferocious, others are only moderately aggressive. They are omnivorous, but most prefer meat and do not shy away from cannibalism.
Biology doctor Paul Saal has been observing the life of piranhas in vivo for several years. During his travels, he visited the rivers of Argentina and Paraguay, Brazil and Suriname. Often he watched with amazement how the local children placidly splash in the waters where predatory fish live, and the women wash clothes, standing waist-deep in water.
Paul Saal believes that the natives have no doubts about the aggressiveness of piranhas, especially if drops of blood get into the water, but at the same time they are well aware of the behavior of the local fauna; they know the periods of its greatest activity and "lull".
The danger increases sharply when the tropical rain season begins: the water level in the rivers rises, and the piranha's voracity reaches its climax. At this time, the predator attacks and devours everything that can move in the water with lightning speed. It even attacks crocodiles.
Paul Saal has repeatedly witnessed how cow drovers, forced to transport livestock across the river to high places during floods, sacrifice a cow. They separate the doomed from the herd and drive her along the river downstream. Half a kilometer from the flock, a shepherd directs her into the water. The unhappy animal takes one step, then another, slowly plunges into the water and swims. But not even a minute passes when the surface of the river around the cow literally boils - these are piranhas attacking their prey.
The drivers remaining upstream begin to drive the cattle into the river at this time. Neither animals nor people are now threatened by the terrible jaw-razors that slaughter the sacrificial cow.
Indians living near the Orinoco Delta in the Venezuelan Amazon use piranhas to bury the dead. They immerse the corpses in water and keep them there until the fish gnaw them down to the skeleton, which is then dried in the sun, painted with bright colors, decorated and buried in the ground.
Piranhas are an Amazonian nightmare, but alas, not the only one. Swimming in the Amazon is also risky because another dangerous animal lurks in its waters - a small torpedo-like parasitic fish. Locals call it kandiru, or carnero, and in science it is called vandellia.
This 6-centimeter creature feeds on the blood of freshwater fish. Anatomical features allow it to easily penetrate the victim's body. It has spiny spines on its gills that fit tightly to the body as it moves forward, and fan out as it moves in the opposite direction. In other words, the position and arrangement of the thorns are such that the vandellia easily enters the narrowest channel, but cannot leave it. Meeting any fish, it penetrates the victim's gill chamber, wielding sharp teeth and spines and greedily sucking blood.
Kandiru is not very tall, no more than a match. And so thin that it is almost transparent. But the natives along the Amazon coast are kept at bay. However, the catfish does not care about people; it feeds on the blood of fish. When the kandiru catfish feels the characteristic flow of water and the smell of ammonia that the fish expel when breathing, he realizes that fish gills are moving nearby in space … That is, the holes of a living creature that you can get into. And drink plenty of blood …
The catfish kandiru crawls through the gap, is fixed in other people's gills with the help of thorns on its fins so that it cannot be thrown out by any force, and bites a hole in the fish. Blood flows from the hole, with which the kandiru is fed. A meal takes from half a minute to two. Then the fish blur, both are happy. The victim is pleased that she managed to get rid of the unpleasant parasite so easily and quickly, and the kandiru is pleased that he has become full and fat. After eating, the catfish grows to fifteen centimeters.
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Not everything ends well if the fish happens to get into the human body or some animal that is not a fish.
When, for example, a person urinates in the murky waters of the Amazon, the catfish feels both the characteristic stream of water and the smell of ammonia, which human urine contains in known quantities. Of course, the fish takes the urethra for the gills and penetrates there with a thin snake.
It would be possible to advise people who find themselves in the waters of the Amazon for any reason not to urinate in the river, but this would be a useless recommendation. After all, the kandiru catfish can also penetrate the anus … The only salvation is wooden underpants, light and durable. The natives make them from coconuts. They reliably protect the genitals and reduce human mortality.
But if you don’t protect yourself when you enter the Amazon, the catfish will swim right up to the bladder.
And it will be at a dead end.
The tragedy lies in the fact that the presence of a kandiru in him causes terrible suffering to a person, and a kandiru in a person is not sweet. Because it is impossible to live inside the human body, but it is also impossible to get out. After all, catfish appear in a person quite by accident, without any malicious intent, as a result of a fatal misunderstanding.
As a result, it is possible to extract the kandiru catfish only with the help of an operation. In the event that the operation is not carried out on time, the person dies.
A catfish, a kandiru, who accidentally swam into a person, always dies.
On the shores of the Amazon, it is also dangerous to sit on the sand: here a worm, known as the nekator, is trapping a person. Penetrating under the skin, it writes out many convolutions and turns and gradually moves to the intestinal mucosa, where it settles, feeding on the victim's blood.
The so-called penetrating fleas are still found in the sand, the females of which penetrate under the skin and, being already fertilized, increase in size and lay thousands of eggs. This is accompanied by the appearance of painful tumors in humans.
A tarantula spider spreads its nets along the banks of the river in tall grass thickets. True, for a person he is not dangerous, since he prefers hummingbirds, who, due to carelessness, fell into his wide web.
A tarantula spider spreads its nets along the banks of the river in tall grass thickets. True, for a person he is not dangerous, since he prefers hummingbirds, who, due to carelessness, fell into his wide web.
But the grass also hides tiny amphibians one and a half inches in size and weighing only one gram - cocoa frogs. They, according to the Indians, are very poisonous, and even a simple touch to them entails inevitable death. Research has confirmed these findings: the poison secreted by the skin of cocoa frogs is ten times stronger than the poison of the Japanese dog-fish, until recently considered the most deadly substance in the world. In its action, cocoa poison is similar to curare, causing paralysis of the respiratory muscles, and then inevitable death. The poison of one frog is enough for fifty arrows of the Indians. The frogs have two bright golden stripes on their black back, as if warning: be careful, do not touch!
The most famous inhabitant of the Amazonian waters is the monstrous water boa anaconda. There are two meters in the girth of an anaconda! Hunters talk about fifteen and … eighteen-meter snakes. Places where anacondas are found, they bypass. Even the strongest predator of the jaguar, the jaguar, cannot resist these two-hundred-kilogram giants.
But the worst thing for the inhabitants of tropical forests is not the formidable predators and saber-toothed fish, but the small sakasaya ants. They live in large colonies underground, but from time to time they leave there in huge hordes and move in a deadly river through the forest, destroying all living things in their path. All living things run away in panic from this merciless army, because there is no salvation from the sakasaya for anyone, neither people, nor jaguars, nor anacondas.