Bill Jaffe., age 15, of Lansing, Mich,, for his question:
He is no bigger than a stack of two or three ten‑inch dinner plates, Yet the little monster is more dangerous than a man‑eating shark, more deadly than Moby Dick, the man‑hating whale, A skin diver is safer with a giant sting ray or an electric eel than he is with the piranha. Even one piranha is a menace when met in the water, but the little horror always hunts with a large pack of his blood‑thirsty friends and relatives.
The piranha is distantly related to the dainty minnow and the lazy catfish. But you would never know it from his looks or from his character. He is a flat, rather round fish with stubby fins and tail, His fishy scales are silvery blue. There is a red streak on the lower fin and at certain seasons the underside of the male fish is streaked with vermilion. His worst feature is his face which is as ugly as his nature.
He has a blunt nose and a bulldog expression. The powerful jaws are gripped fiercely together with the lower one jutting way out in front. Each razor‑sharp tooth is wide at the base and comes to a point at the top. When the jaws are shut, the points from one row of the toothy triangles fit into the grooves between the opposite row.
When the piranha shuts his jaws around a piece of flesh, he takes out a clean round bite the size of a large olive. And those mighty jaws are strong enough to cut through soft metals and all but the hardest wood. He simply bites an ordinary fish hook in two.
The mighty little biter will eat fruit and he can be tempted with a wad of dough on a fish line. But his favorite food by far is fresh meat and no animal on earth is too large for him to tackle.
With his bloodthirsty pack he hunts and lies in wait for fish, frogs and any other water‑dwelling animal he can find. He attacks human swimmers, pigs, dogs, horses and any other animals that come down to the water to drink.
A horse who tries to swim or ford a piranha stream is lost. A pig coming down to wallow in the mud has rooted for his last acorn. The mob of piranhas moves ins first one and then another snaps his jaws over a bite of meat. As the water becomes pink and stained with the blood, the mob goes mad with fury. They dart about often biting each other as well as their helpless victim. In five minutes they will strip a 200 pound pig down to his bare bones.
The piranha is a native of the New World. He shares his watery home with another menace to swimmers, the electric eel, who happens to b e one of his very distant cousins. Both of these creatures are found in the warm and lazy backwaters of the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers. Mobs of piranha are found in some, though not all, of the rivers of South America from Venezuela to Argentina.