”They're just absolutely cute is what they are.” So said David Hart, 39, talking about the latest addition to his piranha collection: 25 baby Pygocentrus nattereri.
”That's the famous redbelly piranha; that's the most common,” explains Hart of his 25 cuties. ”They're actually able to breed quite prolifically in home aquariums.”
They're replacements for the 16 full-grown redbellies that died during a power outage when he was away on a trip. ”The temperature got cool, blah blah blah, and I came back to 16 floating dead bodies. I had to come in with military mop gear just to breathe.”
At the moment, Hart is the proud owner of 28 piranha in all.
He'd kept tropical fish for most of his life, but began developing an interest in piranha six years ago and they were soon the only fish he had.
”There are so many different kinds of them, and each one is a little bit different than the other; their characteristics and feeding behaviors and all that,” he explained. ”Plus, it's more interesting than watching a little guppy come up and nibble.”
He keeps his fish in four aquariums around his east Bend home. In his living room, a 54-gallon corner tank is home to a solitary Serrasalmus altuvei. The fish has to be kept alone or it will potentially have any tank-mate for a snack.
Hart owns his own cleaning business, and in his downstairs home office, kept at a balmy 80 or so degrees, sit three more tanks.
The smaller, 55-gallon tanks hold, respectively, one Serrasalmus irritans, a very rare fish according to Hart, and Serrasalmus elongatus. The elongatus is not rare, yet it is highly prized among hobbyists, as it's ”considered one of the most active and aggressive species,” Hart said. The larger fish eat frozen shrimp, tilapia or catfish from Safeway.
In between the two smaller tanks are those 25 baby redbellies, which live in a 150-gallon tank and dine on chopped, frozen bloodworms. They're not much to look at now, Hart said, but they grow an inch a month during their first six months. After that, they grow about an inch a year, getting up to a total of 14 inches in length.
”Cute” may be the last word you'd expect to describe piranha, but it points toward something Hart and his fellow ardent piranha enthusiasts insist: The toothy little fish have gotten a worse rap than they deserve.
”I think it would be good if people knew that most of what they read about piranhas probably isn't going to be true, you know what I'm saying?” Hart asked. ”It's amazing what people will write. That's like me going out and writing about jet mechanics. But they do it. They write this stuff as if they know what they're talking about.”
Redbellies are the same fish that starred in the 1978 horror/comedy film ”Piranha,” which can be credited with landing the fish in their public relations quagmire.
Though the movie ”Piranha” didn't help their cause, the piranha's reputation as fish of kill-repute really began when Teddy Roosevelt wrote of it in his 1914 travelogue, ”Through the Brazilian Wilderness.”
In the book, Roosevelt reported that ”they are the most ferocious fish in the world. ... the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves. They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water; they mutilate swimmers - in every river town in Paraguay there are men who have been thus mutilated; they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness.”
If ever a fish needed an image makeover, it's the piranha. In the aquatic world, they're second only to the great white shark in the ability to give humans the heebie-jeebies. (Note: This reporter knows of no great whites being kept in Central Oregon.)
Yet our 26th president also wrote that ”there are certain places where swimming and bathing are dangerous; but in most places the people swim freely, although they are usually careful to find spots they believe safe or else to keep together and make a splashing in the water.”
Today, the early impressions of ravenous, jut-jawed eating machines are etched into popular belief like so many bitemarks. No one wants to go in for a swim and come out looking like a Halloween decoration.
The stereotype of piranha as mini, skeletonizing monsters has some basis in truth. Many piranha keepers have felt their sharp teeth firsthand, often the result of handling a fish while maintaining its tank. Hart said he has never been bitten by his fish.
Animal Land Inc. of Redmond stocks redbelly piranha and a few other species, but Hart usually gets his from AquaScape, an online distributor.
Hart said he doesn't know of any other locals who are into piranha. Before he placed his recent order for redbellies with the company, he posted a message as ”The Piranha Guy” at Craigslist.org offering to go in on an order with other interested locals. He had some nibbles, but in the end, no one else in Bend wanted to order any.
However, some other Craigslist users were flagging his postings in complaint. As he explained in one response on the site, piranha are legal in Oregon.
In virtually all the Sunbelt states, piranha are illegal to own, the fear being that if a pair of love-struck piranha should be released into the wild, the toothy little fish would wreak havoc on native fish populations - and swimmers.
In Oregon, it's illegal to release piranha into the wild, just as it is with all aquarium fish. Piranha enthusiasts maintain there is not much to worry about anyway, because the water in Oregon is too cold for them to survive a winter.
The fight over piranha
Frank Magallanes is a Roseburg piranha enthusiast who, until 2000, ran a piranha museum out of his home. He is sort of the Jacques-Yves Cousteau of Oregon piranha keeping.
Magallanes started and maintains www.opefe.com (Oregon Piranha Exotic Fish Exhibit), a treasure trove of piranha-related information. It even includes a map that shows in which states piranha are legal and illegal.
Oregon is among the legal states, in large part due to Magallanes and his efforts on behalf of piranha and their keepers.
As of now, he knows of about 10 other Oregon piranha keepers, but added that it's a young hobby, since the fish have been legal here only since 1995.
”There have been a lot (of people) underground who were keeping them, and now they're more apt to show themselves in the hobby, on the Internet, primarily,” said Magallanes.
The 56-year-old has been involved with tropical fish since the '50s, he said, becoming interested when his brother started acquiring aquarium fish.
”And from there I migrated to piranhas,” Magallanes said. He pronounces the word ”pee-rhon-yas,” as those in the know do. He bought his first rebelly piranha in 1964, and around the same time managed to talk a biology teacher into buying a more expensive piranha for the school science lab. The lifelong love affair has continued for more than 40 years.
Magallanes is a Vietnam veteran, and he writes on his Web site that post-traumatic stress disorder led him to move from California to Oregon in 1992 in search of a quieter place to live.
Ironically, soon after he arrived, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife received an anonymous tip and confiscated his piranha in 1993. The ensuing battle helped make piranha legal in Oregon.
At the moment, Magallanes has about 10 piranha, and said he is getting too old to keep piranha.
But 56 doesn't sound too old.
”Wanna bet?” he asked, laughing. ”I've been doing this since I was a little kid.”
Magallanes has been bitten - once, in the early '70s. The wound required three stitches.
”But it was my own carelessness,” he quickly added. ”Back in my younger days, I didn't realize it had strong enough teeth to bite through a net. And I caught it with my hand, which is something you don't do. (It's) something quite common, even among fishermen in South America.”
Here in the states, a similar-looking tropical fish, called a pacu, will sometimes be found in the wild and be misidentified as the formidable redbelly piranha. Magallanes said it was the discovery of a pacu that led Oregon to ban all piranha in the 1960s.
The battle continued during the 2005 legislative session with the proposal of State Bill 125, which proponents said would have clarified the muddy issue of piranha legality. If it had passed, it would have made certain plant-eating species legal while banning the carnivores popular with piranha enthusiasts.
”This last session got testy,” Magallanes said. The proposed bill, he explained, came about because of a piranha being found in Hubbard Creek in Portland. But at Hubbard Creek, it was no case of mistaken identity: ”It was a piranha that was found out there,” Magallanes said.
And so continues Magallanes' upstream battle. He's up against a number of things.
”Paranoia. Hollywood. A lot of times misinformed fish and wildlife officials who kind of use what I call the 'Roosevelt mentality' on the fish,” Magallanes said. But he adds that ”I agree wholeheartedly that unwanted pet fish shouldn't be released” into local water.
”I agree that hobbyists should be a lot more responsible and not release unwanted fish. But by the same token, Oregon water is too cold for them to live through our winter.”
The ODFW's Rhine Messmer, a recreational fisheries program manager, clears his throat and chuckles when asked about piranha. Asked if he'd like a moment to collect his thoughts, he demurred.
”It's all ingrained in my memory. Originally the statute was put in place to prevent people from having piranha. It included all species and subspecies and hybrids of piranha. But that statute was amended a few years back.”
He also said that ”we get occasional piranha, somebody releases piranha in Oregon - we get one or two reports every year. There are always idiots who are going to release various species of fish.”
Today, piranha in the carnivorous Serrasalminae family are legal in Oregon. That does not mean all species are legal to keep, however. It's the vegetarian fish that are illegal. Go figure.
”Welcome to my world of confusion when it comes to ODFW,” Magallanes replied in a subsequent e-mail to The Bulletin. In a nutshell, he said that pacu, colossama, and other fish the ODFW considers vegetarian piranha ”are not commonly known” as piranha. ”Therein lies the rub.” And the bite.
Messmer himself said there continues to be a lot of ”piranha hysteria.”
”When you mention piranha, people tend to get different notions and different ideas. Some of it stems from popular culture, and some of it stems from misinformation.”
He and Magallanes agree on this much: Piranha would not find Oregon's waters very hospitable. Messmer cited a study that looked at thermotolerance - temperature resistance - of various fish species, including piranha, in Oregon.
The piranha lost their equilibrium between 53 and 57 degrees. Death occurred at 51. To give you some perspective on water temperature in Oregon, the surface temperature of Crater Lake ranges from 32 to 66 degrees, according to the National Park Service, and that's just the temperature at the surface. At the Metolius River near Grandview have been between 37 and 41 degrees over the past week.
Meanwhile, David Hart's piranha should have nothing to worry about. He plans to make his office his own little slice of the tropics, with plants, heat, lighting and even setting-appropriate music.
He may have his way. The Guarantee Cleaning Services Inc. owner has patented a duct-cleaning system that, he said, will soon be manufactured and available in 100 countries.
For now he has enough piranha, but if his invention takes off, he'd like to take the Amazon-style office to another level, replete with aquarium tanks embedded in the walls.
”I'll do it up, bro.”
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