An unusual catch by Gomel’s fishermen — a piranha, the size of a bream, has been caught on the hook. Its teeth are like a human’s. Our fish don’t have such teeth. It is a distinctive feature of beasts of prey from the Amazonian Region. A South American brown pacu, the biggest of the piranha family, has hunted on Volotovskiye Lakes — it’s a place of rest of thousands of Gomel’s residents. A piranha can bite off a finger or the whole hand…Generally, a brown pacu grows to a length of over a metre and weighs up to 40 kilogramme. The Gomel fish is significantly smaller. Perhaps, it’s a young specimen. Piranha in Belarusian waters reservoirs is man-made event, Alexander Kusenkov, Associate Professor of Department of Ecology of Biological Faculty of the Frantsisk Skorina Gomel’s State University is sure.
“Piranhas live in the basins of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, where there are totally different climatic and temperature conditions than in the Volotovskiye Lakes. You understand that such a fish can’t get to us by water. So it’s safe to say that somebody has let it out in the lake; most likely, in the summer. Piranhas would not have any chances to survive over the winter. They would perish when the water temperature got below 11 degrees.”
It’s not the first time such an exotic fish has been caught in Belarus. Piranhas have been caught on the hook by fishermen in reservoirs of the Brest, Minsk and Mogilev Regions. But the question is who are the scoundrels who let out these ‘river wolves’ into our water systems?
