Fish Related to Piranha Caught in Local Lake

A young man who went fishing for catfish in a public lake Friday night instead netted an ugly 11-pound fish native to the Amazon and closely related to the dangerous piranha.

Bryan Trapp, 21, an avid fisherman from Los Alamitos, excitedly recalled Saturday his expedition to the well-stocked lake at Cerritos Regional County Park, about five minutes from his Los Alamitos home. He said he had already caught a few catfish when, just after midnight, he saw the bobber on his line submerge under the weight of a fish that had taken his night crawler bait.

“I could tell by the way the pole was bending and the way it was fighting that it wasn’t a regular catfish,” he said. He and other fishermen who came to watch were taken totally by surprise when they saw what he scooped up in his net--a 21 1/2-inch catch.

“Everyone was in total shock,” he said. “At first we thought it was a big perch, and then we noticed it had teeth.”

He said one observer suggested it might be a piranha and, to check out the possibility, put a finger in the mouth of the fish. The fish bit it. “It looked mean and it had better teeth than I do,” Trapp said.

Thinking that the fish was a piranha, Trapp notified the state police, who in turn called the state Department of Fish and Game.

Louise Fiorillo, a patrol lieutenant with Fish and Game, immediately went to the lake to identify the fish. She was concerned that piranhas might be causing a public menace.

She said she discovered that the fish instead was a pacu, which, although closely related to the piranha, is not nearly as bloodthirsty and prone to attack. The biggest difference between the two fish lies in their teeth: The piranha has single rows of sharply serrated teeth on its upper and lower jaws that interlock on its prey, while the pacu has an extra row of teeth on its upper jaw and its teeth are blunter. Ownership of a pacu is legal in California, while piranhas are outlawed.

Fiorillo added, however, that the pacu is also a rarity in California waters and, at 11 pounds, this one is probably one of the largest ever taken from an urban lake. “The biggest I ever heard of being recorded,” she said, “was an eight-pounder taken out of Big Bear Lake, I believe in the ‘60s.”

She said it is likely that someone emptied his aquarium in the Cerritos lake, where the fish would be likely to grow large by feeding on the stocked native fish.

Trapp said that at Fiorillo’s suggestion, he intends to donate the fish to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History so scientists may learn what it ate and how it survived in local waters.

It is unknown whether other pacus are swimming in the Cerritos lake. Jerry Venable, recreation leader at the park, said he saw someone else earlier Friday catch what looked like a piranha, using a marshmallow as bait when he ran out of meal worms. He said the fisherman threw the fish back into the lake. “I bet they caught it twice,” said Venable.

Fiorillo said she hopes other people do not dump exotic fish into public waters. “If they increase in numbers, they will wipe out whatever native species we have,” she cautioned.

Trapp, meanwhile, takes a fisherman’s pride in his catch. “I feel like you feel when you catch a big fish that ain’t supposed to be there,” he said. “A picture of myself with the fish is really all I want.”