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It's probably safe to say that most people had never heard of the red-bellied pacu before press reports came out in 2013 warning Scandinavian men not to swim nude in the strait of Oresund (a body of water between Denmark and Sweden) at the risk of losing their testicles to a fish with human teeth. The lurid warnings weren't just published in northern Europe, but all over the world: If you’re going swimming in Scandinavia, began a Huffington Post article dated 11 August 2013, for example, wear your trunks — no ifs, ands or nuts: This was the sort of fluff readers might have just chuckled at and ignored, except that in most cases it bore the imprimatur of experts — biologist Henrik Carl of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, for one, who was quoted on the Swedish news site The Local: Well, that scared some people — so much so that museum associate professor Peter Rask Møller, who had written the tongue-in-cheek press release that started it all in the first place, issued a second statement saying it was all just kinda-sorta a joke: It only got more confusing from there. Were the fish really dangerous, or not? Had they attacked people, or not? A zoologist consulted by CNN said definitely not: Which would seem cut-and-dried enough to quell all controversy, and in some quarters it did. The CNN article quoting Fink is still cited as evidence in a Wikipedia entry stating that the pacu testicle biting claims were incorrect and based on a joke that was not meant to be taken seriously. But, in fact, they weren't based on a joke. Rumors about pacu biting men's testicles had already been circulating for years when Peter Rask Møller incorporated them into his 2013 press release. They had cropped up most recently during the 2011 season of the Discovery Channel TV show River Monsters, hosted by daredevil fisherman Jeremy Wade: https://youtu.be/-_bkNDh-4AwI had heard of a couple of fishermen in Papua New Guinea who had been castrated by something in the water, Wade told the Daily Mail in December 2011. 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. Wade was eventually able to track down one of the alleged victims of these alleged attacks, but in the beginning, he had difficulty finding people who had first-hand knowledge of a pacu attack. Even for the locals, including those living on the Sepik river where the mutilations were said to have occurred, it was just a story they had heard and repeated ad infinitum. At that point, the story was a decade old. The earliest piece of evidence we find hinting at possible pacu attacks in Papua New Guinea was a 19 June 2001 query on FishBase, an online forum used by ichthyologists to exchange information: The query cites speculation that a fish reported to have bitten and injured people in the Sepik River might be a flesh-eating piranha: A month later, however, the National Fisheries Authority employee posted again, stating that the species had been identified as Piaractus brachypomus — the red-bellied pacu. But note what else he said about the Sepik River biting incidents: So, within a month after fatal fish biting incidents were reported on the Sepik River, officials of the Papua New Guinea National Fisheries Authority investigated the reports and determined that, while there were pacu in the river, they hadn't attacked and killed anybody. Which might have been the end of the story had not the press gotten ahold of it. Approximately two weeks before fisheries officials came back with the results of their investigation, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) got wind of the pacu attack story and ran with it: Since when did following a trail of urine become a demonstrated trait of the piranha? We don't know. In the past, such a trait has been attributed to a tiny parasitic fish called the candiru, but even then not without controversy. While acknowledging that the specific claim here is that one or more pacu fish killed two men in Papua New Guinea by biting off their penises, not testicles, we're fairly certain that this story — which is itself clearly based on little more than contemporaneous rumors — was the wellspring of all later mentions of genital-biting pacu fish in the media. Albeit largely (though not entirely) ignored by those same media, the National Fisheries Authority went public with the results of its pacu investigation in their July 2001 newsletter: A passage from the actual report written by National Fisheries Authority investigator Augustine Mobiha offers somewhat more detail: The rest, dear readers, is folklore.
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