A San Francisco angler made an unusual catch over the weekend when he pulled up a pacu, a fish indigenous to the Amazon, which also has human-looking teeth and resembles a piranha.
Juan Gallo caught the pacu and said its large teeth cut through his line as he lifted it out of a pond, the Press-Democrat reports. "It landed on the dirt, and you could tell it wasn't anything we had seen before," he said.
The fish is illegal in California but is available from marine retailers in the area, The Independent reports. Matthew Gimlen, a freshwater fish expert at Exotic Aquarium in Sacramento, told The Independent that the fish shows up in local ponds because the owners release them after being unable to care for them. They usually die out during the winter.
The pacu is also in the piranha family and is known as "The Nutcracker" because there have been instances where it has bitten male swimmers in an attempt to eat their genitals, the Daily Mail added. According to the site, two men allegedly died from blood loss in Papua, New Guinea, after the fish castrated them.
Gallo told the Press-Democrat that he notified the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, but if they don’t want it, he might have it stuffed.
Read more at the Press-Democrat.
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