Rare fish with “human teeth” discovered far from home by baffled fishermen
A bizarre fish was caught by fishermen after they discovered it in a lake thousands of kilometres from its home. Ron Rossi and his son Frank were fishing in a lake in Delran, New Jersey when they caught the odd-looking animal.
At first, the pair thought the fish might have been a piranha. The younger Rossi quipped,
“I’ve never seen anything like that before in the lake. It was different.”
But on closer inspection, the fish’s teeth were not pointed and sharp like a piranha’s – but were actually blunt, reminiscent of a human’s. Ron Rossi added,
“We did pull the bottom lip down to see what they looked like and they have almost human teeth.”
After some research, the Rossis discovered that the fish was not some genetically engineered monster.
The weird fish was actually a Pacu, a fish that is usually found in South America. The freshwater Pacu are actually related to piranhas, but unlike their meat-loving cousins, the more docile pacu are omnivorous. A fully-grown pacu, at almost one metre in length, is also much larger than a piranha, and many are kept as pets in aquariums.
But how the pacu ended up in a lake in New Jersey is still something that has the fishermen baffled.
A spokesperson from the Department of Environmental Protection said,
“Many times, these fish are deposited into lakes by pet owners. These fish do not survive in colder water, so we encourage people not to release it into the wild.”
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(All images - credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
