Status: Weird (but probably true) news
A Lubbock, Texas news station has reported that a local fisherman recently caught a fish that
seems to have human teeth:
Fisherman Scott Curry reeled in the 20-pound fish on Buffalo Springs Lake and immediately noticed the catch had human-like teeth. A game warden photographed the fish and is attempting to identify it. General Manager of Buffalo Springs Lake Greg Thornton told KLBK13-TV in Texas that he has never seen anything like the fish in the 36 years he has lived near the lake.
The leading theory is that the fish is a Pacu, about which Wikipedia has
this entry:
The Pacu is a common name used to refer to several species of South American freshwater fish that are closely related to the Piranha. They are vegetarian or omnivorous and are commonly kept as aquarium pets. They have unusual teeth, which strangely resemble human teeth, which they use to crush seeds that fall into the water. Pacus have been illegally introduced as exotic species throughout the world into freshwater habitats, including discoveries in the United States in Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona and Texas.
I'm hoping that Big Gary (as the MoH's fish expert) may be able to shed some light on this.
Comments
"Pacu" usually refers to any of the several species of the genus Colossoma. Several of these, such as the black pacu, the white pacu, and the red-bellied pacu, are commonly sold in pet stores and aquarium shops.
Although it's hard to identify the fish in the photo from the camera angle, I'd say its face does look like a pacu's. However, pacu teeth don't look especially like human teeth to me, except that they are bigger than most fish teeth.
Pacus are Characoid fishes, in the same family as piranhas and silver dollars, but, as the Wikipedia entry says, their main diet is fruit and seeds (much of this food apparently falls into the water from overhanging trees). In their native lands (South America), pacus are prized as food fishes because their fruit diet supposedly gives their flesh a sweet, mild flavor.
It should be said that the pacu makes a singularly bad choice for an aquarium pet. This is because it grows to a length of three feet or more and a bulk of 100 pounds or so (it's a very deep-bodied fish). Many novice aquarists don't realize this when they buy 1-inch or 2-inch-lon babies at the local pet shop. No matter how big their fish tanks are, almost nobody has a tank big enough for this fish (and no, it WON'T stay small if you keep it in a small tank!). It could live in a large pond outdoors, but only if you live in the tropics (pacus live in very warm water).
So the fish-keeper keeps and feeds (and feeds and feeds) the cute little pacu until it outgrows the home aquarium. Then the owner starts trying to find the pet a new home. The aquarium shop doesn't want it back, since it now takes up a lot of tank space and nobody's going to buy a fish that size. The local public aquarium doesn't want it, since its "Amazon" display already has all the pacus it can use, donated previously by other impulse buyers whose pets outgrew their tanks.
So what does the fishkeeper do? Well, the options for most people are:
1. Have a fish fry for the whole neighborhood (assuming you'e never used any medications in the aquarium, since few of these are approved for food fish), or
2. Release the pacu into a local river or lake. This course of action is illegal almost everywhere, since a fish of this size could easily wreak havoc on the lake or river's ecology, and the aquarium hobby considers it highly unethical to release any exotic animal or plant into the wild, but people still do it. If the fish caught at Buffalo Springs Lake was indeed a pacu, this is probably how it got there. Pacus would probably not survive the winter in Lubbock (south Texas would be a different story), but they could eat their way through a whole lot of the lake's flora and fauna before the first hard freeze comes along.
Pacus are kind of charming in their own way, so if you do have an aquarium of, oh, 2,000 gallons or more capacity, I can recommend them. If you don't leave them in South America.
😝
People who see them for the first time often mistake them for piranhas, since they have roughly the same body shape and general appearance, but, as we said before, Piranhas are (mostly) carnivores while Pacus are (mostly) herbivores.
"Yuk - are they dangerous to humans?"
Do you mean Pacus? They won't attack people. You might get bitten removing one from a fishhook (as with any fish ahving teeth),but they are considered a very desirable catch because, as Bruno in Macapa says, they taste good, and they have a lot of meat.
It is a mysterious Human-Toothed Fish.
Poor fish is gagging for some water, and instead has his mouth pulled about by some strange humans.. probably thinks they are after its teath....
put it back in the water!
I finally got it, but it was bigger than our net. I kept it long enought to get pictures. When we got home we sent to pictures to a rarefish finder and he said it was a pacu! It was the coolest thing I'd ever caught!