Better Not Make Snap Judgments of This Fish

I had never fished before, but my idea of fishing has always been standing in a cool brook, holding a beer in my free hand and casting my line at some distant trout.

So what was I doing holding a wooden stick instead of a fly rod and floating in a dugout canoe through a maze of branches deep in the Amazon rain forest?

That’s what I thought as as the sun headed down and the water around me turned black. The only sounds were the piercing squawks of macaws and toucans and the rhythmic splashing of the dark water against the boat. The rain forest looked like a cross between a flooded Mississippi riverfront town and a scene from “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

I kept thinking that Huck Finn didn’t fish like this. But then, Huck Finn never fished in Ecuador. And he never fished for piranha.

I hooked a piece of raw meat onto the line of my crude 6-foot wooden stick and tried to forget the few nightmarish images I had of piranha.

Instead, I remembered a TV special in which a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, went into the water and became a skeleton 60 seconds later.

I remembered the James Bond movie, “You Only Live Twice,” in which the villain, Blofeld, released a trapdoor over an indoor pond and watched his villainess get devoured in a pool of bubbles.

I remembered seeing a school of piranha in the West Edmonton Mall aquarium. I couldn’t help thinking that their jaws looked like little aquatic chain saws.

Sebastian Cornejo, my guide, heard my mumblings and laughed. The son of a Quito lawyer, Cornejo has explored the Amazon for 16 years. He went to college at the Colorado School of Mines, and has heard all the American piranha myths.

“Hollywood will make you believe anything they want you to believe,” he said. “But piranha are just like any other fish.”

Right, I said to myself. Tell that to your favorite capybara.

I knew piranha were all over the Amazon, from Colombia to Argentina. I was in eastern Ecuador, about 50 miles from the Colombian border and six hours--by bus and canoe--from the nearest town. I had joined six other Americans who were intrigued with what the Amazon once was, not what it had become.

We had gathered through Overseas Adventure Travel, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that specializes in adventure trips ranging from gorilla safaris in Rwanda to trekking in Tibet. This Amazon trip was the middle leg of a three-week journey that included a week’s trekking in the Andes and a week’s boating around the Galapagos Islands.

This region of the Amazon is one of the most untouched. Called the Cuyabeno Nature Reserve, it is a national park that has so far avoided the deforestation so common in Brazil.

Here, there are no people. There are no roads. There is just the Cuyamonga River, which in another 250 miles would lead us into the Amazon. The Cuyamonga is just one of the Amazon’s hundreds of tributaries where piranha feed.

So there I sat, in a darkening jungle, hunting a fish I didn’t quite understand, haunted by stories I couldn’t quite forget. I secured the meat on the hook and plopped the line overboard two feet from the boat.

Few creatures on Earth are more misunderstood than the piranha. The wolf? The shark? The rattlesnake? None has quite the same image.

But here are the facts: The piranha is relatively harmless, does not clean 200-pound animals in 60 seconds and, with a touch of lemon, is a pretty good accompaniment to an Amazon sunset.

There has never been a documented piranha attack on a human being. Cornejo said the only mishap he has seen occurred when a tourist accidentally dropped his hand into a bucket of piranha. A fish chewed a hole through his finger, and Cornejo had to stitch it up using Scotch as a painkiller.

Yes, piranha do bite. They bite hard. In fact, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, one piranha under study went from open-mouthed to clamped jaws in less than five milliseconds. That’s faster than the wink of an eye.

Although you’ll find some careless Indians missing toes and fingers, they don’t put much stock in the piranha mystique, because they know piranha en masse will not eat just anything.

“They don’t attack bigger animals,” Cornejo said. “They know their limits. People don’t realize that.”

Which is why I found myself emerging from my daily river baths with all my limbs intact and my skin untouched. Cornejo explained that the only time piranha go on feeding frenzies is when they’re in a closed area, such as a pool, where food is unavailable.

In fact, piranha must survive by eating fruits and seeds that float by during the heavy rains.

In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt heard wild tales of piranha feeding frenzies from Amazon Indians. When he returned home, he spread the stories all over Washington, D.C.

William Fink, a taxonomist at the University of Michigan, has studied piranha for more than eight years and said that if humans are ever attacked by a school, they are already dead--drowning victims, for example.

He said any stories about feeding frenzies are just that . . . stories.

Piranha aren’t all the same, either. There are some 30 species, ranging from the passive pirimbaba to the more aggressive piraya . The region of Ecuador I visited contain mostly the red and black piranha. The black ones are slightly larger, more aggressive and can grow to more than five pounds. They also have huge skulls with jaws formidable enough to build a myth on appearance alone.

Most piranha, however, are rarely more than a foot long or heavier than a pound. Their teeth just make them seem bigger. Lost teeth are no problem; new ones grow back.

Said Fink: “They’re nest-builders and they guard their nest. If you walk through the water into a nest, they’ll bite you.”

Yet, they primarily live off of small fish, leaves, seeds, algae and food every other fish in the water eat. Some monster.

To the Amazon Indians, piranha are nothing more than trash fish, like our carp. In the markets throughout the Amazon region, piranha sell for about 15 cents a pound.

Our fishing expedition was a noisy bunch. Put seven Americans in a boat, give them fishing poles and you have all the silence of a company picnic. I figured if any piranha were in the area, they’d be halfway to Rio by now. Not so.

“Piranha fishing is a little different,” Cornejo said. “You can laugh, swim, stand up, talk and still catch them one after another. They’re a little more bold.”

Sure enough, about 15 minutes after our bait first hit the water, a splashing sound came from the bow. Carolyn, a nurse from Madison, Wis., had landed a piranha, the first we’d seen.

It was maybe 10 inches long, and it bounced on the line like a vicious yo-yo. Its light, shiny underbelly and black spine made it look like a small bass.

But those jaws gave it a look unlike any other fish. Milton, one of Cornejo’s assistants, grabbed the line and held the piranha by the back of the head. He squeezed. There we saw the teeth, two rows of about two dozen each, very small but razor-sharp.

Milton put the end of a wooden fishing pole in its mouth and loosened his grip. In an instant, the jaws clamped down on the pole with the sound of an ax on kindling.

I thrashed my pole in the water to get some attention. A second fisher pulled a piranha up. Then another. And another. Here came a black one. Then a red one with another shiny belly. Here was a fingerling, maybe six inches long, too small to keep. Within 30 minutes, six toothy, fighting-mad piranha were thrashing around in the bucket.

Then came the grand finale. Tired of sitting in the shallow dugout, I stood up and plopped my bait in the water. Suddenly, my line was yanked under the boat. I nearly did a full-gainer into the river.

I regained my balance and dragged the line back to my side of the boat. I gave it a quick jerk and there was what could have been the resident Big Daddy--a black two-pounder, maybe 18 inches long.

“That may be the biggest one I’ve ever seen here,” Cornejo said.

I hope he meant it. This is one fish story I wanted to be true. The average fisherman probably would have stuffed him and mounted him over a fireplace. But I took the common-sense Amazon Indian approach: I ate him. The cook at our jungle camp filleted and fried him in butter. It tasted like sea bass.

I salvaged the piranha head and placed it in a tree over a nest of ants. The next morning, I had a clean set of piranha jaws, teeth and all.

It would look good on a piece of driftwood in my living room. There I would tell the tale of how I nearly lost both hands pulling the predator out of the roiling water, how I witnessed a cow being transformed into spareribs, how I bathed while others stood watch nearby with flashlights and clubs.

And who wouldn’t believe me?