{"id":11332,"date":"2025-02-26T06:55:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T11:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11332"},"modified":"2025-02-25T10:58:50","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T15:58:50","slug":"dont-go-in-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11332","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Go in the Water?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One of many memorable scenes in Fredrick Forsyth\u2019s thriller Avenger<\/a><\/em> (which I\u2019ve listened to three times!) occurs when the hero spends several days scouting the encampment of the villain and sees a stream running along the property, an obstacle he\u2019ll have to cross to get inside. Every day, a worker comes out and throws chickens into the water, which are immediately devoured in a frothing mass of piranhas. Eeeew<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, do piranas have a bad rap? Before you decide, or before authors enlist them to be aggressors in their fiction, you and they might check out Ronald B. Tobias\u2019s article, \u201cRoosevelt\u2019s Piranhas\u201d in the February 2025 issue of Natural History<\/em>. Piranhas acquired their deadly reputation after Teddy Roosevelt made a trip to Brazil and observed piranhas devour an entire cow in minutes with their razor-sharp, blade-like teeth. What he didn\u2019t know was that this demonstration had been carefully staged for maximum mayhem. He was \u201cthe victim of a hoax,\u201d Tobias writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few factoids: most of the 30 to 60 piranha species are vegan; a piranha can detect a drop of blood in 50 gallons of water; they keep rivers clean by \u201cdisposing of\u201d dead or dying animals; the bite of a fully grown black piranha is, pound for pound, more powerful than that of the Tyrannosaurus rex<\/em>; Latin Americans eat them to treat problems of sex drive (men) and reproduction (women); they\u2019re banned in 27 US states, where officials worry they might escape into the wild and breed\u2014piscine pythons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The red-bellied piranha, called Roosevelt\u2019s Piranha, is about a foot long and weighs three pounds. It\u2019s not so big, but it\u2019s the numbers that will get you. They travel in shoals that can include hundreds or even thousands of fish. For the most part, they are relatively harmless, \u201cexcept for a few scary weeks of the year,\u201d Tobias says. In the wet season, the river waters flood vast areas, where many animals live, and fish food is plentiful. As the land dries up again, all these well-fed fish are channeled back into a much shrunken area, trapping predator and prey. Once that limited food supply is gone, the fish attack each other\u2014\u201cthe cannibal fish Roosevelt saw in Brazil.\u201d That is definitely not<\/em> the time to take a swim. As the water polo team in Wednesday Addams \u2013 Piranha Pool<\/a> learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of many memorable scenes in Fredrick Forsyth\u2019s thriller Avenger (which I\u2019ve listened to three times!) occurs when the hero spends several days scouting the encampment of the villain and sees a stream running along the property, an obstacle he\u2019ll … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,1911,32],"tags":[2262,2261],"class_list":["post-11332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-nature","category-thriller","tag-brazil","tag-piranha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2WM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11335,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11332\/revisions\/11335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}