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Thanks to David for this week's suggestion, the piranha!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nFlorida wildlife officer's fish seizure nibbles at illegal piranha sales\n\nHow Teddy Roosevelt Turned Piranhas into Ferocious Maneaters\n\nThe beautiful butterfly peacock bass (not a piranha):\n\n\n\nThe red-bellied piranha (By H. Zell - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82557603):\n\n\n\nChompy chompy teeth:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis week we\u2019re covering a type of fish that I absolutely cannot believe we haven\u2019t talked about before. It\u2019s the piranha! Thanks to David for telling me on Mastodon about a piranha incident that led to me realizing we don\u2019t have an episode about it yet.\n\nDavid\u2019s incident is something that happened in Florida in 2009. In October of that year, a 14-year-old boy named Jake was fishing in a retention pond in West Palm Beach, Florida, which he did a lot. He\u2019d caught all kinds of unusual fish in the pond, including a butterfly peacock bass, which is yellow, green, or even orange in color with three black stripes on its back. It can grow well over two feet long, or 74 cm. The peacock bass is native to tropical areas of South America but was deliberately introduced to Florida in 1984 to prey on other invasive species. This actually worked, and because the fish can\u2019t survive if the water gets too cold, it can\u2019t spread very far.\n\nBut on this particular October day in 2009, Jake caught a fish that no one wanted to find in Florida, a red-bellied piranha! The teenager took the fish to his dad, who called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A wildlife biologist investigated and caught another piranha in the same pond the following week.\n\nThat was enough of a problem that wildlife officials decided to poison the entire 4-acre pond rather than risk having piranhas become naturalized in Florida. The poison killed every single fish in the pond, including at least one other piranha, although it was a poison that quickly broke down into nontoxic compounds. The pond was later restocked with bluegills and other native fish.\n\nThe reason that Florida wildlife officials would rather kill all the fish in a big pond rather than let any piranhas live is that Florida is very similar to the piranha\u2019s native habitat in South America. Florida already has enough issues with invasive species like the Burmese python, cane toad, lionfish, and giant land snail without adding another fish that\u2019s famous for its sharp teeth and voracious appetite. If the piranha became established in Florida, it could drive all kinds of native fish and other animals to extinction very quickly.\n\nThis has actually happened in parts of China, where red-bellied piranha were first found in the wild in 1990 and have since spread throughout much of South China. In some waterways, up to half of the native fish have disappeared after piranha and other invasive species became established.\n\nBut wait, you may be thinking, what about the danger to humans? Aren\u2019t piranhas incredibly dangerous to swimmers?\n\nThe red-bellied piranha is the species that most people think is dangerous to people. We\u2019ve all heard the stories and maybe seen movies where a pack of piranha attack someone swimming along, and within minutes all that\u2019s left of them is a skeleton. But it may not surprise you to learn that those stories are fake, but they\u2019re widespread for an unusual reason.\n\nBack in 1913, the former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, who we talked about in episode 284 about the teddy bear, took part in an expedition to the Amazon basin in South America. The expedition was arranged by the Brazilian government, who invited Roosevelt along.\n\nThe expedition planned to explore the headwaters of the Amazon and it did, at great peril. Three people died and almost everyone got sick from malaria or some other disease, including Roosevelt,