Anglers net piranha-like fish in Don Pedro

Jason Earlywine displays his unusual catch from a nighttime fishing excursion at Don Pedro Reservoir. James Damschroder/Union Democrat, copyright 2009

Jason Earlywine caught a pacu on a recent nighttime excursion casting chicken liver from the banks of the reservoir.
 

Earlywine, who works at Rawhide Meat Processing in Jamestown, believed the two very-foreign looking fish he and a buddy caught were piranhas.         On closer examination, the fish appear to be the more-tempered, but just as foreign piranha cousin, called a pacu, said Peter Moyle, fish biology professor at the University of California, Davis. Moyle has been studying the ecology of freshwater fish in California for more than 35 years.

“It is certainly a pacu,” Moyle said, after examining pictures of one of the fish caught.

Pacu thrive so well in aquariums that they often outgrow the glass cage and owners dump them in lakes or streams – which is a death sentence for these tropical freshwater fish because they cannot survive winter’s chill, Moyle said.

“This happens once every two or three years ... these fish get too big for people’s aquariums, and get big very quickly, and people can’t bear to kill them or eat them so they release them.”

Piranhas and pacu are almost identical looking, other than their teeth. A piranha has a mouthful of vampire-like canines, while pacu teeth oddly resemble human teeth.

“The teeth are too blunt to be a piranha’s,” Moyle said.

Still, the two fish caught in Don Pedro are a catch of a lifetime.

The fishermen keep one sealed in a bag at Rawhide Meat. The other they gave to the biologists at Department of Fish and Game’s Moccasin Hatchery for closer examination.

“I’m going to have it mounted,” Earlywine said of the fish he kept.

The catch came as a surprise to Dave Jigour, lake operations manager for the Don Pedro Recreation Agency.

He hadn’t heard anything of the mystifying muncher.

But Moyle said swimmers should not be afraid of this less-ferocious cousin of the piranha, which many dub the vegetarian piranha.

“They’ll eat seeds, small insects, small fish ... pretty much anything you feed them,” he said — except humans.

Of Roosevelt’s Amazon adventure, which is chronicled in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” he wrote: “A light rod and reel would be a convenience in catching the pacu. We fished for the pacu as the native does, kneading a ball of mandioc farina with water and placing it on the hook as bait.”

Earlywine, outfitted with a rod for catfish baited with chicken liver, hooked and reeled the about 1.5-pound fish from about 20 feet of water with relative ease. 

“It just kind of turned sideways when it came up,” he said.

“I thought it was a crappie,” he said. “But when we got a close look at it, we realized that wasn’t a crappie.”

Earlywine went back to the spot every night for about a week but didn’t catch another pacu.

“We just caught a bunch of catfish,” he said.

Moyle said the pacu cannot establish a population in area waterways.

“If they could be established around here, they would be,” he said. “They’re tropical fish ... it’s really stupid to release your tropical fish in local waters. Usually they’ll get eaten by a predator, or they live until it gets too cold.”