This Makes Me Want to Eat Pancakes. (But It’s Only Thursday.)

Fish scales in a piranha’s belly (and enlarged at left)

by Richard Conniff

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about piranhas and what they eat. In fact, I wrote a book called Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals. And, yes, I have also spent a fair amount of time swimming with piranhas.

So naturally this caught my eye:

The piranha that eats scales its whole life, named Catoprion mento, tends to live alone. When it does hunt, it swims up behind its prey, opens its large, Jay Leno-like jaw 120 degrees and

Advertisements

Richard Conniff’s Bio Note

Richard Conniff has collected tarantulas in the Peruvian Amazon, tracked leopards with !Kung San hunters in the Namibian desert, climbed the Mountains of the Moon in western Uganda, and trekked through the Himalayas of Bhutan in pursuit of tigers and they mythical migur. His latest book​ is ​House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and The Story of Life on Earth (Yale 2016). ​He ​is a National Magazine Award-​winning writer for Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications​​, and a past Guggenheim Fellow.​ His other books include The Species Seekers:  Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (Norton, 2010), Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (Norton, 2009), The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (Norton, 2002) and The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature (Crown, 2006).  He has been a frequent commentator on NPR’s Marketplace, and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He has written and presented television shows for the National Geographic Channel, TBS, and the BBC, among others.