SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Beware the testicle-eating fish:
A fisherman at a South New Jersey lake caught an exotic fish native to South America with human-like teeth and an overblown reputation for munching on male genitalia.
Ron Rossi caught a pacu -- a tropical freshwater fish typically found in the Amazon River -- in Swedes Lake on Sunday, according to WPVI.
Pacus gained a reputation as "testicle eating fish" after Jeremy Wade featured them on a 2011 episode of his Animal Planet show "River Monsters." Wade said Amazonian locals told him two men died after they had their testicles bitten off by a fish.
British tabloids picked up the story and it became an Internet sensation.
"I had heard of a couple of fishermen in Papua, New Guinea, who had been castrated by something in the water," Wade said at the time. "The bleeding was so severe that they died. The locals told me that this thing was like a human in the water, biting at the testicles of fishermen. They didn't know what it was."
...
As for how this Amazonian fish ended up in Jersey, the state's Department of Environmental Protection said the pacu in question likely belonged to a fish hobbyist. These fish are just a few inches long when they are typically purchased. When they reach maturity, however, they can be 3 feet long and more than 40 pounds, earning a reputation as "tank busters."
"Every once in a while, someone who has bought one of these fish realizes it has outgrown its welcome, gotten too big and they release it into some lake," department spokesperson Lawrence Hajna told The Huffington Post. "I'm sure that's what happened here. Any fish like this won't survive our winters because the waters get too cold."
Deep down you've always known there was a serious reason for being an aquaphobe.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @12:32PM
There are way more scary and disturbing things in New Jersey than some ball-chomping fish. Stay on the turnpike and keep going till you hit the state border. You've been warned.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 26 2015, @01:06PM
That's sound advice. Once we were on the turnpike and my girlfriend said she was hungry. That was her warning before low blood sugar turned her into a werewolf. So I saw a services sign for a Wendy's just .2 miles off the turnpike. We exited, and found the Wendy's, but there was no way to get to it--there were concrete dividers that prevented left-hand turns across the road to get to it. We tried to do the sensible thing, well, the sensible thing in any other part of the universe, and get off at the next exit and try to double back. We wound up trapped in an endless series of cul-de-sacs at night, in the fog. 3 hours later we saw someone's taillights and followed them out.
New Jersey is a fucking nightmare.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @08:12PM
They're called New Yorkers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @01:13AM
See subject.