Were the fish really dangerous, or not? Had they attacked people, or not? A zoologist consulted by CNN said definitely not: It's up to people themselves how careful they want to be. Of course, this is half a joke since it is very unlikely that you would actually meet one here and that it would bite you. We did say that we recommend men to keep their swimsuits tied up until we know if there are more pacus out there in our waters. Well, that scared some people - so much so that museum associate professor Peter Rask Møller, who had written the tongue-in-cheek press release that started it all in the first place, issued a second statement saying it was all just kinda-sorta a joke:
"They bite because they're hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth," he explained. While Carl said the museum's warning about the pacu, sometimes known as the "ball cutter", was meant "as a bit of fun", human victims of the pacu are rarely laughing. "The pacu is not normally dangerous to people but it has quite a serious bite, there have been incidents in other countries, such as Papua New Guinea where some men have had their testicles bitten off," said Henrik Carl, fish expert at the Danish museum. This was the sort of fluff readers might have just chuckled at and ignored, except that in most cases it bore the imprimatur of experts - biologist Henrik Carl of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, for one, who was quoted on the Swedish news site The Local: The Pacu can grow to 55 pounds, has giant teeth and looks angry, but is usually the more friendly cousin of the piranha. They’ve also been known to mistake testicles for something nice and crunchy, and they’re strong enough to take off a finger.įisherman discovered the horrifying little creature, which is native to South America, in the Danish/Swedish strait of Oresund, CNN reports. "If you’re going swimming in Scandinavia," began a Huffington Post article dated 11 August 2013, for example, "wear your trunks - no ifs, ands or nuts":Īuthorities are warning skinny dippers about the Pacu, a fish similar to the piranha that really enjoys cracking nuts with its strong jaws. And in Papua New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific, the invasive species is blamed for castrating a couple of local fishermen. The legend grew when the pacu reportedly showed up in Denmark three years ago, leading a fish expert at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen to warn male swimmers against skinny dipping in the Baltic waters. The story of two Amazonian fishermen who died after their testicles were bitten off by pacus went wild on the internet. Pacus earned their nasty reputation for feasting on male genitalia after Animal Planet host Jeremy Wade featured them on “River Monsters” in 2011. Wildlife officials aren’t as worried about men’s testicles as they are how the tropical fish ended up in Lake St. Reputed Testicle-Eating Fish with Human-Like Teeth Caught in Michigan It's probably safe to say that most people had never heard of the red-bellied pacu before press reports came out in 2013 warning Scandinavian men not to swim nude in the strait of Oresund (a body of water between Denmark and Sweden) at the risk of losing their testicles to a "fish with human teeth." The lurid warnings weren't just published in northern Europe, but all over the world:
There are no documented instances of Pacu fish biting men's testicles off, or of anyone's dying from a pacu bite.
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