Is the fish's deadly rep justified?
By Catherine Schwanke Posted 04.02.2009 at 6:45 am 4 Comments

Feeding Frenzy A school of piranhas could strip your flesh in five minutes Adek Berry/Getty Images

After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish—-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

Related Articles

The Jellyfish Engineer
Study Suggests Eating Whales, Not Saving Them
What's the Biggest Thing a Carnivorous Plant Will Eat?

Tags

The Environment, Catherine Schwanke, amazon, april 2009, aquarium, carnivorous fish, fish, fyi, piranhas
Piranhas get a bad rap. Yes, they are carnivorous critters with sharp teeth. "It’s like they have a mouthful of scalpels," says Erica Clayton, Amazon collection manager at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Even so, instances of piranhas biting humans are extremely rare. Most are happy snacking on other fish and plants.

In general, if you leave them alone, they’ll do the same for you. Still, if you decide you must take a dip in the Amazon, make sure you don’t have any open wounds—-the smell of blood attracts piranhas.

Want to learn more about the environment, solar energy, sustainability, and more? Subscribe to Popular Science and enter to win $5,000!

4 Comments

link to this comment
Stanfi
04/03/09 at 12:38 am

I had a piranha & an alligator gar for over ten years in my aqaurium & periodically I needed to put my hands in to clean parts of the tank & never was attacked by either.

link to this comment
bendayan
04/03/09 at 10:23 am

I live in Venezuela and I took many dips on rivers and reservoirs infested with piranhas and nothing happened to me. In my opinion when the piranhas are well fed in their own environment probably nothing will happened to you. On the other hand, on small ponds where basically are piranhas only I will not recommend to enter, because they will sure eat you.

link to this comment
dontbother
04/10/09 at 2:10 am

My brother used to have a piranha (the species with a red patch), and it was literally scared of everything: if you put anything in the tank (your hand, a net, etc), it would dart to the corner of the tank and cower. Sometimes it would even change its mind when it was attacking a feeder fish, sometimes they'd manage to last a day or two without being eaten.

I heard there's another species that you can get that's so aggressive that it will attack anything, even hoses in the fish tank.

link to this comment
suzyjenkins
07/13/09 at 5:39 pm

I always wanted a pet piranha, but I shied away from it. http://johnnymorgan.deviantart.com/journal/25916042/



Download Our iPhone App

Stay up to date on the latest news of the future of science and technology from your iPhone with full articles, images and offline viewing



Grab the Tech Buyer's Guide iPhone App

Carry everything you need to make a smart buy on HDTVs, cameras and 14 other product categories right in your pocket



Follow Us On Twitter

Featuring every article from the magazine and website, plus links from around the Web. Also see our PopSci DIY feed



Become a Fan On Facebook

Share links with friends, comment on stories and more


February 2010: Renovating America

Innovative fixes for five of the country's biggest infrastructure messes, plus a look the quest to read the human mind, the LCD screen that might finally kill paper dead, and the world's scariest science.

Read the issue here.

Popular Science Photo Pool


Share your photos in the Pop Sci pool at www.flickr.com!