CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Yikes! You may never want to go river swimming again after reading this!
A fisherman reeled in a scary find on the Catawba River. Jimmie Smith, told WBTV, he thought he caught a piranha in the river. However, experts said it’s something else.
“Definitely, a pacu, not a piranha," Robert Stroud of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources said. "It’s a South American fish. It’s not a flesh eater.”
However, the fish is a distant cousin to the piranha. The fish has human-like teeth while a piranha has tiny, sharp teeth.
So, how did the pacu end up in the Catawba River?
“It probably outgrew the aquarium and so rather than dispose of it like they should they bring it down here to the Catawba River,” Stroud said.
That's because some people are dumping their unwanted pets, causing lasting impacts. “Exotics can come into an introduced area and wreak havoc on the native fauna,” he said. They can end up out-competing existing species.