Piranha Caught in Ohio!

[BigBassin144]

This is part of an article from the Toledo Blade (toledoblade.com) by Steve Pollick. The rest of it goes on to explain how it was an aquarium fish and shouldn't have been released, and so on.

"Adam Eibling of Huron needed an angling boost recently and he got it from an unusual catch - a 5.11-pound, 20 1/4-inch pacu, a toothy vegetarian cousin of the meat-eating piranha of the Amazon basin.


He caught it when he stopped off at the Sandusky River north of Fremont after work to wet a line. "I'd been having a bad few weeks of fishing," he lamented, explaining a need to feel a big fish on the line "and hear the drag of the reel."


So he kneaded a slice of wheat bread into a ball, minus the crust, molded it onto a hook, and with a sinker tight-lined it on the bottom. "This is what I do when I want to catch a big carp," Eibling said. Big carp fight like bulldogs and indeed do make a reel sing - salve to soothe a fish-starved angler's soul.


Presently Eibling instead was surprised with the pacu, which he had confirmed at the Ohio Division of Wildlife's fisheries research station at Sandusky. He deemed the catch unusual enough and big enough to have Port Clinton taxidermist Jim Wendt mount it.


An amusing twist to the tale occurred when Eibling talked the fishing staff at Wal-Mart in Port Clinton into weighing the pacu on their certified scales. He went outside the store to retrieve the fish, still live in a cooler full of water. On his way back inside, the greeter told him he could not return merchandise without a sticker. Whereupon Eibling flipped the lid and offered the greeter a chance to place a sticker on the toothy fish within."




BB

Oh, here's the picture of it too.

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll...9110363&Ref=H9

[nofearengineer]

I always laugh when these news stories come out. They invariably call the Pacu a "cousin" of the Piranha. Pacus are not really that closely related to Piranha. They also usually fail to mention that the Pacu is a complete vegetarian, and wouldn't hurt a fly. I would swim in a pool full of a thousand Pacus with no reservations whatsoever. Also, Pacus and Piranhas can't survive the Winter north of the deep, deep South. Relax, alarmist journalists.

[Bubba_Bruiser]

Somebody couldn't hold it in there aquarium anymore and laughed while they were throwing it in the river thinking it would live. They caught one a while back in one of our state lakes in MS. But the biologist said, like NFE, they cannot survive the winters, even in MS.