By Janet Jacobs
Local anglers have caught some unusual fish from the I.O.O.F. Park lake this week, leading the city to put up “no swimming” signs, according to Sharla Allen, parks director.
At first glance, the fish caught resembled a piranha. However, a late afternoon phone call Wednesday from a wildlife expert has everyone breathing easier — the fish is actually a “red-bellied pacu,” and presents no health or safety concern to humans, Allen said.
Quanah Malott of Corbet was fishing at the I.O.O.F. Lake Sunday with her granddaughter, Lacy Kate Severn, 7, when she caught one of the mysterious fish. She caught another Monday. Another angler caught a similar fish at the lake too, Allen said.
“I tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to think,” Malott said. “I’ve fished all my life and never caught anything that looked like that. Without thinking, I threw it back in the lake,” after catching it on Sunday, but first took a picture of the odd fish.
Malott said her daughter researched the rare find on the Internet and thought the fish might be a piranha, and told her to keep the next one if she caught another.
When Monday’s trip back to the park yielded another catch, Malott held on to the fish and notified the sheriff’s department, who referred her to city authorities. Allen launched a project to determine just exactly what the mystery catch was, which turned out not to be a piranha, as first feared.
Pacu resemble some South American fresh-water fish, and its scary cousin, the piranha. Both are toothy and aggressive with reddish coloring, according to Ken Kurzawski, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife in Austin.
“We get a few calls each year of people catching these,” Kurzawski said Wednesday. “They’re almost always pacu. There’s only been a couple of piranha caught.”
The difference is in the protruding lower jaw of the piranha, which the I.O.O.F. fish don’t appear to have. Pacus are omnivores, which means they’ll eat plants and animals, while the piranha are strictly carnivores.
The exotic species get into local lakes and streams because their owners get tired of them, biologists explained.
“People use them in aquariums and they get rather large, like a lot of exotics, so people just take them out of their aquarium and release them in the lakes.”
Pacu haven’t been known to reproduce in Texas lakes, although they will survive for a while, Kurzawski said.
“I haven’t seen spots where a whole bunch of them build up where they’d be a problem for our native species,” he said. “There’s other fishes, like tilapia, that do reproduce and build up pretty big populations in lakes, but so far pacus haven’t shown that.”
Being exotics, the fish aren’t protected, so fishermen and women are welcome to catch all they can.
They are also delicious, said Richard Ott, a biologist who has spent some time in the Amazon. Ott works out of the Tyler office of the Texas Parks and Wildlife office.
“They’re absolutely fantastic to eat,” Ott said.
He said the fish are often the former pets of young men who find themselves overwhelmed with the care and feeding of fish that have gone well past the guppy stage. Then, after being dumped in a local lake, they’re caught by anglers.
“People think they’re piranha and they get all upset, but 99.9 percent of the time they’re pacu,” Ott said.
Even before finding out the fish was not a piranha, Malott was determined to keep on fishing.
“I told them I didn’t care if there was a great white shark in there, we were going to fish,” Malott said. “Sitting on the bank I’m not scared of nothing.”
Pacu are fruit-eating fish in their native South American waters, Ott said.
In Corsicana, they’ve been biting on earthworms and weenies, according to Allen.
“Oscar Meyer beef weenies,” said Malott.
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