The piranha fish has long had a bad reputation. It is believed that by right! Piranhas are kill-hungry and blood-hungry. Their appetite is insatiable; a flock of piranhas can quickly gnaw the carcass of a pig or ram, deftly stripping the meat from the bones. But not all types of piranhas are so scary. Some of them are harmless …
The victim didn't stand a chance. One had only to let the trout into the pool, where piranhas splashed, as flocks of enemies pounced on it. In less than a second, one of the fish plucked a whole piece from the side of the trout. This was the signal. Driven by their hunting instinct, six other piranhas began to rip new pieces out of the trout. Already her stomach was tortured. She jerked, trying to dodge, but another squad of assassins - there were now about 20 of them - seized the fugitive. A cloud of blood spread in the water, mixed with scraps of viscera. The trout was no longer visible, and the furious predators all rushed about in the muddy water, poking their noses into the invisible outline of the trout.
Suddenly, after some half a minute, the haze passed. The piranhas calmed down. The thirst to kill subsided. Their movements slowed down. There is no trace of trout, a fish 30 cm long.
Classics of the genre: bloodthirsty piranha
If you have ever seen piranha hunting in a movie, you will not forget these horrible scenes. At the mere sight of it, ancient fears arise in the human soul.
From Alfred Brehm to Igor Akimushkin, books about animals are full of stories of bloodthirsty piranhas. “Quite often a crocodile takes flight in front of a bloodthirsty flock of these fish … Often these fish overpower even a bull or a tapir … Dobritshofer says that two Spanish soldiers … were attacked and torn apart” (A. Brem). These messages have become "classics of the genre." Every schoolboy knew from now on that the rivers of Brazil were teeming with killer fish.
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With the passage of time, schools of fish swam from books and articles to movie theaters. And it is unlikely that any of the connoisseurs of creepy stories, once in Brazil, will dare to go into the waters of the river if they find out that piranhas are found there.
The first reports of them began to arrive when the conquistadors reached Brazil and went deep into the forest. From this kind of message, blood ran cold in my veins. “Indians, wounded by cannonballs and musket bullets, fell screaming from their canoes into the river, and ferocious piranhas gnawed at them to the bone,” wrote a Spanish monk who accompanied Gonzalo Pizarro, the seeker of gold and adventures in 1553, during a predatory campaign in lower reaches of the Amazon. (Horrified by the cruelty of the fish, the pious monk did not think that the Spaniards, who fired cannons at the Indians, were no more merciful than the piranhas.)
Since that time, the piranha's reputation has been fairly intimidating. They smelled blood better than sharks. Here is what the German traveler Karl-Ferdinand Appun, who visited Guyana, wrote in 1859:
"With the intention of taking a bath, I just plunged my body into the warm waters of the river, when I jumped out of there and retreated to the shore, because I felt a piranha bite on my thigh - just where there was a wound from a mosquito bite, which I had scratched to the blood."
Reading such confessions, at some point you catch yourself thinking that piranhas are the fiends of hell, who escaped from there through an oversight and are now tyrannizing people and animals. There are no more terrible creatures in the world. An awkward step into the water - and dozens of razor-sharp teeth dig into the leg. Righteous God! One skeleton remained … Is it all true?
The golden mean: flooded forest and great dry land
“It would be naive to demonize piranhas,” wrote the German zoologist Wolfgang Schulte, author of the book “Piranhas”. For about 30 years he studied these tropical predators and, like no one else, knows their two-faced nature: “But it would also be naive to portray them as harmless fish, absolutely not dangerous to humans. The truth lies in the middle."
More than 30 species of piranhas live in South America. They usually feed on small fish, shrimp, carrion and insects.
Only a few piranhas attack warm-blooded animals: among them, for example, red and black piranhas. These fish are quick to kill. If a young heron, having fallen out of its nest, flops awkwardly into the water, “it is surrounded by a flock of piranhas,” writes V. Schulte, “and in seconds only feathers remain on the water”. He saw such scenes himself, although it is not easy to meticulously understand the river battles. Even experts hardly distinguish between individual types of piranhas, since the color of fish changes dramatically with age.
However, the most aggressive piranhas usually eat only carrion. “They rarely attack living mammals or humans. Usually, this happens during the dry season, when the fish habitat is sharply narrowed and there is not enough prey. They also attack individuals with bleeding wounds,”explains Schulte. If the attack was successful and the victim spattered blood, all nearby piranhas rush to her.
So, the aggressiveness of piranhas depends on the season. During the rainy season, the Amazon and Orinoco flood. The water level in them increases by about 15 meters. Rivers flood vast areas. Where a forest grew recently, boats float, and the rower, having lowered a pole into the water, can reach the crown of the tree.
The flooded forests are turning into a granary for piranhas. Their choice of food is great. Local Indians know this and, without fear, climb into the water. Even children splash in the river, scattering flocks of "killer fish". On the Orinoco fairway, teeming with piranhas, lovers of water skiing carelessly ride. Guides transporting tourists on boats do not hesitate to dive into the water, and right from under their feet tourists catch piranhas with fishing rods. Miracles and more! Predators behave more modestly than trained lions. It's just that circus lions sometimes have an appetite.
The piranha's character changes when the great dry land sets in. Then the rivers turn into streams. Their level drops sharply. Everywhere you can see "lagoons" - lakes and even puddles in which fish, caimans and river dolphins, which have become captives, splash. The piranhas, cut off from the river, lack food - they fuss and rush. They are now ready to bite anything that moves. Any living creatures that find themselves in their reservoir are immediately attacked.
As soon as a cow or horse lowers its muzzle into the lake to drink, angry fish grab onto its lips - they pull out the meat in pieces. Often piranhas even kill each other. “During a drought, no local resident would dare to swim in such a body of water,” wrote Wolfgang Schulte.
Skeleton in Waves of Memory: Fisherman and River
Harald Schultz, one of the best experts in the Amazon, wrote that during his 20 years in South America, he knew only 7 people who were bitten by piranhas, while only one was seriously injured. It was Schultz, who lived among the Indians for a long time, who in his time invented an anecdote, ridiculing the fears of Europeans, for whom death is hiding in the forests of the Amazon at every turn. Until now, this anecdote wanders from one publication to another, often taken on faith.
“My father was 15 years old then. The Indians were chasing him, and he, running away from them, jumped into a canoe, but the boat turned out to be flimsy. She turned over, and he had a chance to start swimming. He jumped out onto the shore, but that's bad luck: he looks, and only a skeleton remains from him. But nothing more happened to him."
Often fishermen become victims of piranhas, and they themselves hunt for them. Indeed, in Brazil, piranhas are known as a delicacy. It is easy to catch them: you just need to throw a hook tied to a wire into the water (the piranha will bite into the usual fishing line), and tug at them, depicting the fluttering of the victim. Right there on the hook hangs a fish the size of a palm. If a fisherman stumbles upon a flock of piranhas, then just know have time to throw the hook: every minute you can pull out a fish.
In the passion of hunting, it is not difficult to turn into a victim yourself. The piranha thrown out of the water wriggles wildly and gasps for air with its teeth. By removing it from the hook, you can be left without a finger. Even seemingly dead piranhas are dangerous: the fish seems to have stopped moving, but touching its teeth - the mouth will reflexively shrink, like a trap.
How many adventurers who reached the shores of the Amazon or its tributaries lost their fingers in the old days just because they decided to catch some fish for dinner. This is how legends were born.
In fact, what at first glance is a piranha enemy? The fish seems ordinary-looking and even dull. Her weapon is "sheathed", but as soon as her mouth is opened, the impression changes. The mouth of the piranha is dotted with triangular, razor-sharp teeth that resemble daggers. They are positioned to snap like a zipper to your clothing.
An unusual and manner of hunting, inherent in piranhas (by the way, similar behavior in sharks): having stumbled upon a victim, she instantly rushes at her and cuts off a piece of meat; swallowing it, it immediately digs into the body again. Thus, the piranha attacks any prey.
But 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 the stomach," notes American journalist Roy Sasser. Piranha is not the prophet Jonah, ready to rest patiently in the belly of a whale: she begins to bite and is able to kill the predator that caught her.
As already mentioned, the piranha has a well-developed 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. But it should not be forgotten 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 nothing can be seen 10 cm away from you. All that remains is to sniff or listen to the prey. The sharper the scent, the more chances of survival. The piranha's hearing is also great. The wounded fish flounder desperately, generating high frequency waves. The piranhas pick them up and head 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 the predators would soon kill all the victims, like wolves that entered the sheepfold. But piranhas killed only one goldfish per day for two, 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 out on rich prey - a school of goldfish. Therefore, on the very first day, the piranhas bit off their fins. Now the 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. Every day, they chose a new victim and, slowly, ate it.
Amazonian "wolves" - friends of the Indians
In their homeland, these "killer fish" 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, on 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 200,000 cubic meters of water into the ocean, it's easy to imagine what wall of water is rolling backwards.
The river flows for kilometers. The consequences of these regular floods can be felt even 700 km from the mouth of the Amazon. Small animals die from them again and again. Piranhas, like kites, clear the whole area of carrion, which otherwise would rot for a long time in the water. In addition, piranhas exterminate wounded and sick animals, making the populations of their victims healthy.
The pacu fish, a close relative of the piranha, is completely vegetarian - she is not a forest orderly, but a real forestry. With its powerful jaws, it gnaws nuts, helping their nucleoli to wake up in the soil. Swimming in the flooded forest, she eats fruits, and then, far from the place of the meal, spews seeds, spreading them, as birds do.
Learning the habits of piranhas, one can only remember with bitterness that at one time the Brazilian authorities, falling under the terrible charm of legends, tried to put an end to these fish once and for all and poisoned them with various poisons, simultaneously exterminating other inhabitants of the rivers.
The natives of South America have long learned to get along with piranhas and even made them their helpers. Many of the Indian tribes living along the shores of the Amazon do not bother digging graves in the rainy season to bury their relatives. They lower the dead body into the water, and the piranhas, born gravediggers, will leave a little of the deceased.
The Guarani Indians wrap the deceased in a net with large meshes and hang them over the side of the boat, waiting for the fish to scrape off all the flesh. After the skeleton is decorated with feathers and honorably hidden ("buried") in one of the huts.
Since ancient times, the jaws of piranhas have replaced scissors for the Indians. Making arrows, poisoned with curare poison, the Indians cut their arrowheads with piranha teeth. In the victim's wound, such an arrow broke off, all the more poisoning it.
There are many legends about piranhas. Villages and rivers in Brazil are named after them. In cities, however, "piranhas" are called girls of easy virtue who are ready to rob their victims clean.
Nowadays, piranhas have also begun to be found in the waters of Europe and the United States. I remember that some tabloid newspapers reported about the appearance of "killer fish" in the Moscow region. It's all about exotic lovers who, having got unusual fish, can, fed up with "toys", throw them directly into a nearby pond or sewer.
But you shouldn't panic. The fate of piranhas in our climate is unenviable. These heat-loving animals quickly begin to get sick and die, and they will not last the winter in open reservoirs. And they do not look like serial killers, as we have seen.
N. Nepomniachtchi