A particularly gruesome email came in the other morning from Suriname, a beautiful country on the northeastern shoulder of South America. Early last month, a family from the Netherlands was vacationing at a resort on the Suriname River. The eight-year-old daughter was playing with her brother in the shallows, in an area supposedly protected by a “piranha-proof” net. Suddenly the children started screaming.
Another tourist carried the girl out of the water, with blood streaming down from her foot. At the hospital, doctors identified the deep divot cut out of the girl’s right foot as the toothy bite of a piranha. The family caught the next plane back to the Netherlands for further treatment.
The story made my eyes go wide, as my informant no doubt knew it would. Jan H. Mol is a fish biologist at the University of Suriname, and he and I have traded notes on piranhas since traveling together on an expedition in Suriname a few years ago. We’ve both spent a fair amount of time in the water with piranhas and lived to tell the tale (one of my books is titled Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time). We’ve also both made considerable effort to Read the rest of this entry »