I’m a hungry piranha and you know what that means. Yes, I’m longing for a really good piece of fruit: açaí berries, or maybe aguaje. Not much about right now: the rainy season won’t be here for a good few weeks yet and I’ll have to make do with plants. Plus a bit of flesh, of course.
Monday
I always enjoy the swagger that’s part of every shoal: the ripple of water as we brush the surface and the panicky retreat on the land when a human notices us. And you know what we’d do if that human entered the water, don’t you? Yes, indeed: we’d swim away, and pretty sharpish. We piranhas stick together for protection from predators. We don’t hunt in packs.
Tuesday
Well, maybe I wouldn’t swim away. If was in the mood I’d attack. I’d bite the damn toes, get a good gobfull of human flesh – and then run for it. Let me tell you about a lake at Palmas in Brazil. In six months there were 190 piranha attacks on humans. Every one was a single bite on the foot.
Wednesday
I could do with a good foot to bite. But there’s always plenty of dead stuff in the Amazon and scavenging is one of our many talents. We shared a drowned bamboo rat today: not bad. We’ve got a really powerful bite: that part of our legend is true enough.
Thursday
Let’s get a few things straight. We’re piranhas: pee-rah-nyas, if you don’t mind. While we cherish our legend we can get fed up with it: James Bond’s enemy Blofeld despatching his assistant into a pool of piranhas: “This organisation does not tolerate failure.” Sometimes, I wish life was like that: but you can’t beat a nice piece of fruit in season.
Friday
It amuses me to think of the way our legend was created. They wanted to impress the former American president Theodore Roosevelt when he went to the Amazon in 1913, so they netted off a short stretch of river and filled it with piranhas. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Didn’t bother feeding them of course. After a few weeks they were starving and stressed to a point of desperation. When Teddy arrived they told him piranhas could eat a cow alive if they wanted to. Teddy was had. Hook, line and sinker. “The most ferocious fish in the world,” he wrote. “Blood in the water incites them to madness.”
Saturday
It’s those humans that are prone to madness. Is there nothing they won’t believe? We’re just useful scavengers who clean up the river. Sure, we’ll grab a piece of a passing big fish – an arapaima, for example – take a mouthful of tail and bugger off. But the rains are coming and then I’ll feast on fruit and insects. With luck I’ll rear a nice little brood: a spot of parental care, guard the nest – one look at me sends most marauders away – and soon enough there’ll be another generation of piranhas to frighten the crap out of humans.
Red-bellied piranha (pygocentrus nattereri) CV
Lifespan Ten years
Eating habits Fruit, insects, fins, the occasional toe
Hobbies Biting
Sexual preferences Nice toothy smile
Photograph by Leonid Serebrennikov / Alamy