Posted on 06/27/2006 1:31:14 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
N.D. Woman Catches Piranha in Reservoir
JAMESTOWN, N.D.
State wildlife officials have a fish story with some teeth to it. Game warden supervisor Dick Knapp and district game warden Jason Scott responded to a call over the weekend of a woman catching what she thought was a piranha at the Casselton Reservoir.
The small fish with big, sharp teeth is native to the Amazon River in South America.
Knapp said the catch was confirmed by biologists. The state Game and Fish Department believes the four-inch-long red-bellied piranha probably came from someone's aquarium.
"It had to have been somebody's pet," said Greg Power, the state fisheries chief.
Introducing a foreign species to North Dakota waterways is illegal, but officials said they have no idea who put the piranha in the reservoir, which Power said is a small fishery on an unnamed creek that has been dammed. Knapp said the warm-water fish would not have survived the winter, anyway.
Power said the piranha likely was too small to have done any damage to other fish in the reservoir, which has trout, panfish and other species.
He said he has heard of piranha being caught in other states, but that this might be a first for North Dakota.
"We have had goldfish that were put in (lakes) ... but never a piranha," Power said.
Also...it looks like there are more piranhas on the loose in the mid-west. Here is a freeper link to another news report from Michigan about a week ago:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1652826/posts
It will die in the winter. They are a tropical species.
Dinsdale?
That is, unless there is a heated spring (or a power plant outlet with heated water).
Celebrate diversity. < /sarc >
Like coconuts, eh?
So how DID it get there?
It swam upstream from the Amazon.
How do you think it got there? Someone put it in there.
It could have been carried by a swallow.
Must be global warming. Too hot in the Amazon for this guy; he decided to go north for the summer.
That's good to know, I always thought seeding rivers with piranhas would be great eco-terrorism.
Now if only kudzu died in the winter.
They taste like spotted Owl.
What? A swallow carrying a piranha?
Rust never sleeps, and kudzu never dies. On the other hand, my ex-wife could never get any house plant or garden to grow. If we could put her in charge of maintaining the kudzu here in the South, it would be gone inside of six weeks.
"So how DID it get there?"
It's got big sharp pointy teeth, and it can LEAP!
I apologize for jumping ahead.
Maybe if the piranha was in a coconut filled with water,.....
or else the swallow would getting called Lefty by his fellow flock.
Not every state official is as scientific about the piranha. In Maine possession of a piranha is a crime. Many states ban them even though an established population is inconceivable even in the Everglades. Their temperature requirements do not go below 60 F.
Good one! Thank you fer yer support!
You're obviously not familiar with "Operation Razorteeth"
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